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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a job interview I was on. I was asked about how I would use AI/machine learning for their problem space. Since they seemed to be smart and level-headed, I answered honestly, "Pick something unimportant, use a machine learning algorithm just to get familiar with the tools, ignore the result unless it happens to work, then put machine learning in your marketing materials. But keep track of it, and if it is useful to you in 5 years, be sure to use it for real."

They said, "That's about what we concluded except that we didn't get around to actually doing that pilot project yet."

I got the job. :-)

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Speaking of jobs and interviews. I am yet to find a job board which does not show JavaScript jobs when searching for Java jobs. Some of them claim to use AI. :)

My wife once watched me as I did a job search, carefully setting all the available parameters to match my requirements. She said "don't forget, engineering jobs are posted by admin staff", typed "software engineer location" into Google, and found way more than I ever did.

Let's not forget the job application systems that make you chronologically list every previous employer, their location, your title, and dates of employment, your education history including dates and degrees received, skillsets/technologies you have experience with, etc. All information that is on your CV and/or LinkedIn profile and they want you to manually re-type it into their late 1990's era job application system rather than using some basic NLP to extract it. Personally, the moment I start applying and the system asks me for more than my email/mobile and a CV upload, I bail on the application.

I guess that is intentional to throttel down on people applying. It works for me: Except, when I desperately need a job, I don't apply. I primarily only know "this" style of applying - It's all big corp companies, though, I must admit.

In fairness I have this issue with a number of human intelligence based (allegedly) recruiters.

Of course, that's where machines gets it from as well. Your training set is usually which candidates were shortlisted by recruiters. At least that is what I have seen people do who are built one of these AI based recruitment systems. When I asked them are they not worried about such bad quality data, their answer is - humans know the best. Ah well, then why are you building this again?

The exact same applies to blockchains.

Blockchain is mostly a marketing tool, not something you would want to use in production for anything.

I think generally that is how many products and features work.

That sounds odd, like they don't really need machine learning (unless it is to snare investors?).

Snaring customers too. I swear, people are obsessed with "machine learning" even when the domain really isn't suited for it.

I sometimes wonder if management and engineers don’t have more in common than acknowledged. Publications such as Harvard Business Review have huge coverage of things like managing AI, and being able to say you managed an “AI project” might mean something.

I wonder if people are becoming more savvy and anti-ML after all the issues people have with Facebook and Google collecting a lot more data than people are comfortable with.

I suspect what people dislike is big data. Anecdotally, I'd love to hear about a success where some lone genius codes a better tool using publicly available datasets. I don't like the idea of BigCorp using their larger servers to dominate the space.

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