Hacker News Reader

Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

> What I find most interesting with this is that it shows they believe there is nothing unique at Meta related to AI

Whether or not this is the case, I don't get this as being the reason for Sousmith leaving - it sounds as if he is just ready for a change.

Still, it is noticeable that with many of the AI companies claiming that their version of "AGI" is just around the corner, developers and staff don't appear to be particularly excited about this (I assume they realize it is just hype, not some momentous advance around the corner), and leave to pursue different things, such as Mira Murati starting a fine-tuning company, Karpathy going back to education, others switching ship (typically from OpenAI to Anthropic), etc.

View on HN

> Still, it is noticeable that with many of the AI companies claiming that their version of "AGI" is just around the corner, developers and staff don't appear to be particularly excited about this

Why would they be excited about it? There's little in it for them.

Nobody that has to work for a living should be excited for AI, they should be genuinely afraid of it. AGI will have vast, deeply negative consequence for almost everyone that has to work for a living.

"Ready for change" is just the polite way to say, "I can't stand it here anymore. I'd rather roll the dice on a new place because reversion-to-mean means it's probably going to be better than whatever this has become."

There are a lot of things I don't like about my current job, but not enough for it to make sense to gamble on a new place. It's easier to push for change from my current position than to count on any new place being any better.

But if it gets worse and I do leave, I'll definitely be telling the interviewer, "I was just ready for a change."

On the other hand, while I know nothing about Soumith, he clearly has enough financial runway (see my calc below) to not have to work again.

As far as I know, we all get one life. If one can help it (modulo other constraints), one should not get trapped by prestige, achievement, short-term admiration by others, impact and external facing factors. To see an alternate reality, it helps to escape the bubble, for example, by spending time in a completely different culture or environment where no one knows or cares about what one did.

I admire people taking such decisions. It's easy to be on autopilot in life. But, people who wear their success lightly are rare but more philosophically aware, in my opinion at least. I wish him good luck!

> see an alternate reality, it helps to escape the bubble, for example, by spending time in a completely different culture

I'm at similar position now, need to make decision. The problem is after leaving IT world for a while it will be hard to get back. I'll have to change my life completely and discard all knowledge and expertise I have. That will be fun, interesting, eyes opening, etc, but no way back.

I don't know you, don't know your situation, but this does not seem to match the experiences of many of my friends who left for a while and then came back. "Spent two years starting a restaurant" and "had to take care of my parents" were not blockers for getting another computer related job in due time. There are few truly irrevocable decisions in our life.

Now, the current job market makes this significantly harder than it was in the 2010's, but that's floating over all of us- if your company does an Amazon tomorrow, would you get a job as nice as you currently have? Maybe, maybe not.

In executive roles, your expertise really is in management acumen a lot of the time. But as an individual contributor--or adjacent--once you're out of a technical space for a few years, it's increasingly hard to get back in even if you've casually kept a finger in.

Exactly, the only way to stay current is to keep doing something at least half time. The good thing it doesn't have to be the same as prev job. Just keep brain working and learning.

Agree and disagree. Yes, keep brain working and learning of course. But, if you've dropped out of some space, you're going to be pretty rusty about what is currently going on.

I think age plays an important part in the decision to move away from a place. I think in your 20s or very early 30s you have far more leeway to kind of go away and start again, but a lot of the hope to actually be able to find that unicorn workplace fades away as you approach your late 30s. Once into your 40s, depending on your trade, you're dead on arrival unless you successfully manage to rebrand yourself as a consultant, whatever the fuck that means.

Age does factor in various ways. It can be "it's now or never" or it may be "I might as well hold on for a few" or something in between.

> is just the polite way to say

Can be*, that's not necessarily always true. I've quit jobs plenty of times without having any plan for the future or particular drama-reason for leaving, just "It's not as fun here anymore, despite this being a great place to work", I'm sure I'm not the only one who does so.

What I've never done though, is leaving a place without being 100% honest exactly why I'm leaving. I won't say "I was just ready for change" if that wasn't the reason, I have no reason not to be honest about why I'm leaving.

I've generally had 10+ year tenures other than a return to school that was basically always in my plan and dot-bomb (leaving a company I wasn't really a fit with anyway). But, yeah, I've always been ready to move on at about that ten year point which is actually fairly long by a lot of people's standards in the tech industry.

I do disagree though that, unless there's some actionable change that would specifically benefit you like more money, my answer outside of private conversations with people I know well is going to be some variant of "time for a change." Anything else just invites arguments and conversations I don't want to have.

I do want to push back on this a little. People leave all the time for this "I wanna see what else is out there" especially at such senior levels and with so much financial security as he inevitably has from working at Meta for 11 years. It is not always a gamble for many of them, and many of them are not so skeptical and cynical of other places they could go and bring their expertise

Reply on news.ycombinator.com