Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I really hope you're doing ok and seek appropriate mental health support. Don't fret over the ranking of companies - we're all dead and forgotten in a few generations anyways. This is true for every Google and Netflix engineer in existence.
Readit Newsi_love_music commented on Ask HN: In 2022, what is the proper way to get into machine/deep learning? · Posted by u/newsoul
Someone who can engineer infrastructure, pipelines and fire fight production issues is hard to find, but that’s not the point I was making.
My apologies; It is real work; the point I was making is it’s not ML work, any more than writing a yaml file is ML work.
If you want to write yaml files, any number of possibilities exist.
If you want to work with machine learning, then don’t become a data engineer. The skills are, mostly, not related ML, and more closely aligned with SRE / devops.
It’s not infrastructure and helping build models as you mature and advance: it’s almost literally just infrastructure and fire fighting… in my, limited, 3 years of experience as such.
Great comments. I agree with your take on what being an ML Eng actually means. Of course this will vary to a degree from team to team and company to company, but I think you still capture it well.
I absolutely think MLEng is important and much needed, but too often under appreciated. Being this half breed part engineer part ML leaves you on a lonely island often in many orgs. The ML managers don't really understand what you do and neither do the engineering managers. It is kind of thankless unless your management really understands your role and appropriately advocates for you.
MLEng is often an engineer who wanted to get into the sexy ML space and since it is in the title it feels cool. Then you realize you're more an Ops engineer who deals with the inane code of many "true" DS/ML scientists. Thankless, indeed.
i_love_music commented on Ask HN: In 2022, what is the proper way to get into machine/deep learning? · Posted by u/newsoul
What?
A lot of the hard part isn't the model, and especially in a world where bert, xgboost, optuna, pytorch, etc have solved much of the classic problem and forced 'real' DS to specialize on either the business consulting side (not math/engineering) or theory side (barely implemented). The rebrand of 'data analyst' (SQL, powerbi, . ..) to 'data scientist' by even top tech companies underscores this. It's not yet to where web dev has gotten in terms of global $20/hr fiverrr contractors, but already at say $40/hr for someone who can build real production models for more boring scenarios.
The result is the vast bulk of data scientists (phd, self-trained, consulting, ...) we interview are weak engineers, so going from a make-believe notebook to a trickier production scenario requires the data engineer / MLOps / etc to solve a lot that a typical DS doesn't really understand in practice. Scale, latency, distributed systems, testing, etc. Likewise, the part the DS solves has little to do with the latest neuroips paper, and more just about lifecycle tasks like getting better data, which the other folks on the team will often be involved with as well.
So 2 natural high-paying paths here:
data engineer / MLOps -> MLEngineer -> DS
data engineer -> all-in-one data analyst/scientist -> ML/AI data scientist
Definitely agree with your first two paragraphs, but am confused by the pay paths. Can you expand on what the paths mean?
i_love_music commented on Fine dining faces its dark truths in Copenhagen ft.com/content/a62a96b8-2... · Posted by u/LordAtlas
> And then they find reasons to explain why equality and fair treatment isn't for everybody.
I completely agree with this. In Seattle, our city council proposed an ordinance requiring minimum wage and hour standards for so-called platform workers (your nominally independent contractor staff for companies like Uber and Lyft and Amazon and the like). Everything was, by Seattle political standards, going smoothly until DoorDash put the "the cost of your delivery will go up because of meddling by the Seattle council" blurb in their app. Then, immense pushback.
I hear this fairly often from people I work with. I work for a medical practice group and patients, of course, want to be seen outside of the hours when they work, so we have some clinics that are open until the ungodly late hours of 7 or 8pm. One clinic is, because the clinic director is a Khan-level tyrant, open for four hours on Saturdays.
The amount of moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by some of my colleagues, and some of the medical staff, when their turn in the rotation comes up is deafening. To be asked to work anything other than 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday is an affront to dignity.
Yet these same people think nothing of also complaining when their favorite restaurant spot trims its hours back from midnight to 11pm. Or when the grocery store closes at 10pm. Or that places are crowded and have slower service on the weekends.
Where, exactly, do they expect all of those employees to come from and why should those employees "suffer" to work nights and weekends?
It grates on me.
Thanks for calling this out. I too have noticed the same behavior and it’s frustrating. I’m happy to see others notice the same phenomenon.
“Expectancy violations (e.g., harmonic, rhythmic, and/or melodic violations) are strongly correlated to the onset of musical frisson, such that some level of violated expectation may be a prerequisite.”
Interesting. The Spotify playlist didn't do much for me, but when I think of a couple moments in songs that always give me chills, they all feature that pattern:
Nightwish, Ghost Love Score, Wacken 2013 @ 9:22, affectionately nicknamed the "Floor-gasm" by fans. The melody line feels like it's already gone as high as she can possibly go and is just going to descend by a couple notes. Instead she takes it up another 5th to what feels like an impossibly high note, and then holds it there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47e_961OQWE#t=528
Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons, @ 13:01 and again @ 13:28. It follows one of the odd-time-signatures, chromatic-only jam sessions, and then the band teases an end multiple times starting @ 12:40. When the jam session finally resolves into 4/4 time and the guitar comes in with those held power chords, you're like "Ahhh...." and then just as you start grooving along to that rhythm, the guitars/bass/drums drop out entirely and it's just acapella vocals over keys.
+1 for Dream Theatre. Progressive metal is my number one source of Frisson. Brutal, heavy lows followed by soaring, melodic highs really does it for me.
Before I learned of the name frisson, I always thought it was an adrenaline response.
So...it's decentralized but if you don't like how it plays out then you run off to a centralized power structure to fix it?
Ha yes exactly. "We have transcended the need for rules. Except this one rule. And maybe another rule if you keep being mean. And if you break that rule I'll call my mom on you"
I'm in my late 20s, but I noticed that people live as if they are forever.
They spend half of their life working for survival, preparing and planning for their (!) future.
Some people die in the process and never live to see that future, but some people reach that point and become aware of the finite time that just elapsed.
Having physical needs met is trivial in our society. Everything beyond is self imposed suffering by comparing oneself to others.
But for what purpose? Just to have more than someone else? Just to be better than someone else?
Nobody truly cares. Nobody cares about how fancy the technology is that someone built to make people click more ads online - even if that someone thinks he is doing god's work.
We came to this earth naked and we will leave naked. Just like my parents did. Any material possessions and people will be left behind. Most of us will be forgotten 2 generations ahead or end up as UTF-8 characters on wikipedia.
I can at least walk joyfully in the present and not suffer my imagination about the future. I can also make a conscious choice to not indulge in activities that destroy the planet for others. I don't think the older generations see it the way I do.
I love this take. Refreshing to read. Thanks for your words. It has helped me slow down and enjoy my day.
Sorry you feel that way, I'll try to be frank here, if my advice isn't useful, just don't take it.
I know a few people exactly like you, that like to boost about how well off they are and that are depressed and sad, but they treat life as it is a game of competition, this is why they usually start by displaying how "they've won", but in reality they were the only ones that were silly enough to only think about work.
What do you like to do outside of work, that isn't some sort of addiction, such as gaming, gambling and doesn't give some kind of thrill that you also get in business and while making money? Try to spend more time doing those things.
Also to say those things to your wife and come here and say is load, makes me believe you don't respect her at all. What does your therapist say about this?
You've decided to waste the best years of your life working a lot and making money, and now you fail to appreciate the things you've conquered etc. At your age, there is still a lot of things you can do. Now there is still a lot of golden days, but it will never be like you were 20, for sure.
Such as, if you try to skate, every fall will hurt much more than when you were young and take longer to recover. Same is for playing an instrument, will take much longer to learn. We are like fruits, eventually we will get rotten.
Also the way you talk about depression seems like you want to hide behind it. Honestly depressed people can't get shit done as you do, I live with somebody with it and they can't wake up, have a business or deal with commitments as you've done, to me it seems you are mostly sad because you want to always be on a peak, winning, sort of like a cocaine addict, hence my earlier comment about addiction.
A therapist can help with that, invest on more sessions and if the current one isn't working, find a new one.
I personally love your take. I don't know about this person, but it resonates with me. Especially the part about treating life as a game or competition and the only success metric is work/money/power. I'm by no means a lost cause, but I dabble in that game more than I want to. Or, I should say, I assign too much self worth around those metrics.
What this really tells me is that the best engineerineers at Dropbox are looking to quit.
Yes, best interpretation yet. This data is whack. I would take it all with a massive planet size grain of rice.
Roku: “Current economic conditions”
Cisco: "rebalance across the board"
Amazon: "unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment”
Disney: “a targeted hiring freeze”
Meta: “macroeconomic downturn”
Salesforce: "performance issues”
Stripe: “stubborn inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets and sparser startup funding,”
Opendoor: "the most challenging real estate market in 40 years”
Once a company or two uses these phrases it become politically acceptable to repeat them because they have now been "vetted". Contrarian or outsider views are not well received most of the time despite all of us wanting to believe we're different/unique/contrarian.
Humans are such an interesting species.