Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, I'm amazed at Andrew's list of accomplishments. I mean any one of these would be a career capstone for most people

- Stanford Professor

- Founding lead of the Google Brain project

- Author of one of the most famous and loved MOOC's

- Head of AI for Baidu, built up the AI team in both China and the US.

- Founder of Coursera

And I see from wikipedia that he and I are roughly the same age :(

Engineers are often seen as a cost center for most businesses, which means you'll eventually hit a compensation ceiling If you want to elevate yourself into one of the engineers you hear about that is able to break through the compensation ceiling then the below is one of the best ways to do so.....

> My team birthed one new business unit per year each of the last two years

If you can directly tie yourself to a Pnl then you'll always have more options than someone who is considered a cost center.

I hope that what ever he does, he takes some time of first if he needs it. I'd hate for someone like this to get burnt out.

I really enjoyed this Andrew Ng talk:

https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc

Some excerpts:

Anti-Evil AI drives funding: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=37m20s

Radiologist will be impacted: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=57m38s

Against Basic Income: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h1m57s

Trolley Problem (who dies): https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h25m50s

Only reasonable explanation is that he has a secret AGI working for him in the shadow.

...and all that (excluding the professor part) since 2011! Boy, talk about working fast!

In case you can't tell, there's a great big sarcasm tag there. There is absolutely no way that the guy has contributed substantially to all of those things in less than six years.

Sometimes, people get a reputation for something, and then leverage that into a slingshot of career advancement. Good for him, but the people who are doing the actual work of developing this stuff can easily spend six years on a single problem, so it's helpful to maintain perspective.

Or, perhaps a little less cynically, that it takes a long time for your work to reach a critical mass, but past that point many factors come into play that allow you to ship stuff at a much increased pace: your work has a much higher visibility, more people are willing to collaborate with you, you have easier acccess to grants, etc

This guy is an executive. He isn't "shipping" anything, and it isn't cynical to say that.

Engineers tend to think about these things as if the world is a meritocracy based on your individual contributions. But for a lot of famous people, 80% of their contribution comes from attaching their name to the management page.

I agree with you that none of this would be possible without the years of work he did to build his reputation. But people shouldn't feel bad just because a well-known person has lots of flash on their resume. This stuff accumulates at an unnatural rate.

Don't executives ship...execution?

Become Stanford professor > Get prominent job > show you're cool > Get invited to do things!

But I doubt his work rate and energy was any less before, just as you say, it's visibility. And very cool.

Maybe we should all be on the lookout for at least one career move, that gains us a relative boost in visibility, even at the expense of other desiderata.

Step 1 is not easy.

Indeed.

But assuming we each perfectly knew how to set our attainable goals - full awareness of human ability to succeed beyond imagined limitations, counted - what a CV like this tells me, is that the benefits to oneself, but also the world at large, really only begin to accrue when it seems to my experience (my bro becoming prof, unusually late in career, but for good reasons in pursuit his own interests, before) should absolutelynot be considered a ultimate, terminus, goal.

What I say, could be said as "rest not on your laurels", but it is i think more profound than that. At l;east I think so: because one's value to others can massively multiply, if you seek beyond what you may first think you are working towards.

And, if your goal is for instance to be appointed a Stanford Professor, does your perspective on career, pace of work, the work you pursue in fact along your way to that goal, all of that actually change so much, when you look beyond that, and see the utility you should instead aim to be, afterwards?

When my dad taught me Squash (he was a well known, widely published, coach) he first taught me to swing through the stroke, much as golfers know how also. Not only is there a huge uptick in stroke confidence, when you connect cleanly in this way, and power, too, but he was teaching me to calculate the angle of incidence, through my body, and that gave me instantly greater understanding of the shot. Of the future arising from my objective. Sure i was very young, this was a first lesson almost, so it is hardly great insight into Squash technique. But is it not, applied, not great insight into technique in playing Life?

He happens to be a very good teacher -- I've seen this first-hand, and anecdotally a great builder of teams and mentor.

So ... these are real skills that supersede individual-contributor skills.

In the same way that software offers leverage, really good people-finding -training and -inspiring skills allow you to turn yourself into a group intelligence.

Really effective people can enter a positive reinforcement loop where they just go exponential.

I don't mean to put down Andrew's achievements, but once you have a dense enough (high-impact) network, these things appear to happen on their own.

Also note: Andrew's wife is the founder of Drive.ai (and the other two founders are his students).

The smartest thing Andrew has done is to hire a PR agent right after he did the ml-class MOOC, and never breathed a day without consulting him/her ever since.

Do you have a source for this? Searching doesn't yield any results.

Amazing guy, I must say!

Like Nicola Tesla ... it's no coincidence he says AI is the new electricity.

Tesla was considered a kook in his days - he definitely wasn't mainstream.

You kidding? He was well known in all the celebrity circles, lived it up in the middle of Manhattan and had Gatsby-like parties.

Andrew Ng is mainstream? People know his name?

And coincidentally building a portfolio with lots of stock grants at more than one of our coming AI overlords. Not a bad plan for the future!

I didn't know he was a founder of Coursera. I thought he mentioned Coursera because of the MOOC <facepalm>

After making his first video course, he teamed up with Daphne Koller and made Coursera as a platform for courses.

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