SamvitJ

"Every single person I know working in AI these days (in both the academy and industry) has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment."

This does not ring true to me at all. Anecdotally, it feels the rush to get into AI (in both industry and academia, for both individuals and organizations) peaked around 2016-2020, post-AlexNet/ResNet, around the time Transformers became very popular. Hiring for ML research roles in particular definitely slowed down in 2021, and 2022 of course saw a broader course correction across all of tech.

That said, I do agree that ChatGPT may be the "first iPhone moment of AI", in that is the first mainstream, end-user application of deep learning that millions of people have really engaged with.

> Winning Competitions > In the presentation, Stripe said it generated $14.3 billion in revenue as it processed $816 billion in payments volume last year. The company’s so-called transaction margin before losses — a measure of net revenue — rose to $3.17 billion, or 0.38% of total volume. That compares with 17 basis points for rival Adyen NV, according to the presentation.

Does anyone else feel these numbers aren't as high as expected? Sure $14B in annual revenue (and margins of ~$3b on that revenue) is nothing to scoff at. But $14B isn't even close to Amazon/Azure cloud big or even Amazon Ads big.

Perhaps Stripe's valuation assumes a steep uptick in this revenue in the years to come?

Confirmed: search for "don't be evil" in the Code of Conduct here: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/. It's there at the end.

Most of these are great. Disagree on "read the news" though.

The pay in consulting is not typically the main draw. Finance and tech are almost always more lucrative. Even within finance, most jobs do not pay particularly high salaries for entry-level positions, if seen through the lens of hourly rates (e.g., investment banking).

And pg's Twitter account has been suspended. Crazy times.

Could there be a confirmation bias to this observation?

You distinctly remember the times you had an outlier belief which you ignored to your detriment, but tend to forget all the foolish-seeming ideas you had which were indeed very much foolish when taking stock of the past.

I think the opposite advice might be even more useful for many, many people: be more scared of overconfidence, because you know less than you think. Research on cognitive biases and the underperformance of "experts" in many fields tends to support this view.

What does AI STE refer to? (AI software engineer?)

In my experience, what happened is that young people eventually stopped posting personal updates (this was a multi-year process), either because the novelty of it declined or because they entered a life phase change (e.g. leaving college) that made social updates less frequent or less shareable.

In my friend group, this happened around 2018, about a year after we left college and entered the working world. I'd guess something similar happened with many cohorts.

Actually, Jeff Bezos worked at a startup, Fitel, for two years, as his first job out of college. (Maybe 1990 D.E. Shaw would be considered a startup, too, actually.) But good points regardless.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career

"According to Krys Hines, a Washington, D.C.-based workplace wellness and ergonomics educator at KH Ergo and Wellness, the recent shift to remote work has aged our bodies by about 10 to 15 years."

Not surprising that a seller of ergonomics consulting services (https://www.khergowellness.com/) would make an unsubstantiated claim like that.

Just a note that neither Pichai nor Zuckerberg actually said the words: "Too many employees, but few work". This is just recycled from another news site [1] which chose to summarize their comments that way.

[1] https://in.mashable.com/tech/36076/google-has-too-many-emplo...

Hard disagree. ML is hard to break into, even with strong credentials. (Source: ML engineer)

I'm surprised this article had no mention of Elon Musk, because he's a great example. Perhaps if this article was written today, it would.

Elon's antics, if nothing else, raise brand awareness of his companies.

One added piece of context: the author now runs a consultancy on the "important, but often non-urgent, work of culture-building" (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brie-wolfson-17758724).

So that (at least partially) explains the stance on culture she espouses.

"Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code" is the crux of this article, and stated like a fact. IMO this is not as obvious as the author believes, and needs a solid defense.

I love this take on regret, and it really resonates with how I reason about it.

I wrote a short blog post on the idea of judging your past self based on your current values: https://www.samvitjain.com/blog/regret/. Curious what you think!

Note: this data is from https://www.sequoia.com/, which is a company unrelated to Sequoia Capital.

Is this the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia? Seems he omitted a major factor in his kids' success, which is his own educational pedigree :)

He worked in quant finance, which is pretty cushy from what I hear (though not as cushy as tech).

The one counterexample that comes to mind is Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Jeff spent eight years working before starting Amazon (albeit in finance), and yet Amazon is not particularly known for being employee-friendly.

I was really worried about this person reading through this post (felt like a lot of negativity and short-sightedness) until I came upon the fact he had a full-time job offer at Facebook. Still worried, but not as much.

Why is the URL amazonaws.com for this? Just because something is hosted on S3 doesn't mean the content originated from AWS...

Do you mean that a "college degree is a waste of time and money unless you want to go into academia"?

If you had to decide between dropping $X for a computer science degree, and $X for e.g. some liberal arts degree, are you suggesting that the liberal arts degree is a better investment for a career as a developer?

I'm not sure if you're making a statement about how things should be or how they are. Because pretty sure 90%+ companies still value computer science degrees.

Looking at their about page, they were a senior director of product management at a major company (GitHub/Microsoft). The number of meetings is not surprising for that role.

I think this article has a number of great points, but maybe is a bit dated for the current "LeetCode" era, where the number one attribute that major software employers look for (especially at junior levels) is timed coding chops, not backchannel reputation.

Not a tiny purchase, but I use this 250W corn bulb lamp all the time for lighting up my office room in the winter months: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W5DGBJZ/. Amazing amount of light (35k lumens) and does not overheat.

Ah got it, I actually appreciate that clarification! That makes sense. I guess the article didn't convince me that anonymous advice can work.

Could someone explain why this is being downvoted? I didn't mean it in a snarky way, I just am not able to place some of this advice without knowing who it is from!

I'm less inclined to take this advice (though much of it is fine) because there is no name attached to it. Why would I take an unknown person's advice on something? How do I know I can trust them if I don't know anything about their career?

Even more importantly, I don't know the context behind any of this advice, which is needed to process it appropriately.

Some examples:

> If you need a PhD, get through it ASAP.

Is this really good advice? I would encourage people to be extremely skeptical about getting PhDs - i.e., work in the real world first - and then if you still really want to do one, do it well, so that you have a shot at the kind of post-PhD opportunities that would make it worth it.

> Develop specific skills and think about specialising early.

The anecdote on this is weird and I'm not sure I agree (depends on what they mean by "specialize"). If by specialize, they mean "major in something practical" sure I agree with that. If by specialize, they mean, "aim to become a expert in some niche in your field in college", disagree.

> Be wary of slow feedback loops.

Agree mostly, but disagree with the specific examples given. If you know you want to be a lawyer, go to law school.

> Be strategic in your career decisions.

Agree, but the opposite advice would also be fine: careers are long and complex, so don't attempt to be overly strategic early on.

> Think about going to a startup.

This just looks like startup shilling.

> When you’re great at your job, no one’s advice is that useful.

Not sure this is true.

> Know the relevant senior people.

Not sure this is THAT important early on in your career.

> Be irrationally optimistic.

Useful if you are in sales or a founder, but for most other careers (e.g., engineering), I would advise rational optimism.