I did it a couple of years ago. Just left and accepted a slightly lower compensation in a non-FAANG company, but still a very respectful salary.
Didn't regret it for a moment.
My advice is to just fire some CVs, do some interviews, and see if any of the offers you will eventually get make sense for you, in terms of the ratio of Compensation vs. Responsibility. While you are still employed, you can always refuse offers.
And now it's time to throw this account away. Cya.
The UK, thankfully, is not part of the EU anymore however.
I don't think labor protections are eroding however. Those tend to be very popular among the population here.
Perhaps I am wrong? Do you have more information about this?
I know that there are some leeways to avoid labor protections in some places, such as being employed as a temporary contractor, but I understand there are some limitations to this practice.
Part of the reason the US has dismal social security is the same "dog eat dog" hyper individualistic mentality that is also present in people thinking it's their sacred right to own assault rifles and shit.
At least that's my impression from the outside. I never really went to the US to taste it first hand.
> How is this legal, in the famously pro-labor EU?
Because it's actually pro-labor.
I go into a job knowing an employer cannot simply fire me out of the blue. Meaning I have a little stability to be able to plan my life a few months in advance.
The fact that Europe has a strong labor laws, worker unions and such is the reason why I chose to migrate to Europe and disregarded the US as a destination. A decision I never came to regret, by the way.
Keep that awful "at will employment" to your side of the pond, thank you.
You just described with incredible precision my approach to jobs and career.
The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility.
I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.
> Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient.
That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth. Perhaps depends on your role?
Honestly, for all the companies I worked in the past decade, the ones where I had better quality communication were the ones where I worked remotely.
Then again, I'm a software developer. Developers tend to be good at communicating through pull requests, documentation, screen sharing and text-based chat where you can send snippets.
This is actually an interesting reply, and something I did not consider.
To me, the most impressive part of ChatGPT was not that it could give mostly correct answers to known problems. In a sense, internet search could do it already (just in a much more cumbersome way), with similar degrees of correctness.
The most impressive part for me was actually how seamlessly it parses and produces fluent natural language. Text generated by it reads like something a human would type.
So far I didn't try to fool it by purposefully asking something ambiguous (something that is a characteristic of natural languages), or ask about something that has an ambiguous answer to see how it handles it, but so far I'm impressed.
But I never considered that people may restrict the research of AI to language models due to the rampant success of this avenue of research. I hope this is not the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised (i.e. the success of ChatGPT works as a blackhole for investment in the area, with everyone racing to cash in on it).
> Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now?
Not with language models. A language model can parse natural language, and with enough training data, give out what it thinks the answer is based on the data it was trained with. It is not General AI.
It cannot reason a solution for a problem that had an unknown answer. It won't be able to reflect logically on a context to foresee problems within this context. It cannot have a meaningful conversation. It won't be able to understand that one of the things it "knows" was incomplete, untrue, or just plain wrong, and fix itself.
It's a powerful tool, a game-changing tool. Perhaps as game-changing as the advent of computers, internet, or wireless communication. But it still won't replace humans.
General AI for now is science fiction. Perhaps this is unfortunate. I wouldn't mind an AI that can replace humans, even if I too am made obsolete with it.
When all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails?
I'm genuinely impressed about ChatGPT, and have been thinking about many times in the past when having such a tool at hand would have been massively helpful. Natural Language Processing is a damn hard problem, and ChatGPT seems to be a huge advancement in that regard.
But I actually laugh at all the people that think that this will replace humans in any meaningful capacity. If your job is only giving known answers to known problems, then you have something to fear. Otherwise this will only be a powerful productivity tool.
A Language Model will replace software developers much like Excel replaced accountants.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but answering questions for known answers is precisely the kind of thing a well trained LLM is built for.
It doesn't understand context, and is absolutely unable to rationalize a problem into a solution.
I'm not in any way trying to make it sound like ChatGPT is useless. Much to the opposite, I find it quite impressive. Parsing and producing fluid natural language is a hard problem. But it sounds like something that can be a component of some hypothetical advanced AI, rather than something that will be refined into replacing humans for the sort of tasks you mentioned.
Didn't regret it for a moment.
My advice is to just fire some CVs, do some interviews, and see if any of the offers you will eventually get make sense for you, in terms of the ratio of Compensation vs. Responsibility. While you are still employed, you can always refuse offers.
And now it's time to throw this account away. Cya.