And who actually makes that much?
Or are you counting also VC money into that "profit"?
1,705 karma · joined June 9, 2015
Or are you counting also VC money into that "profit"?
And none is remotely profitable.
Esp. when they aren't even sure whether they will commit to offering this long term? Who would be insane enough to build a product on top of something that may not be there tomorrow?
Those products require some extensive work, such a model finetuning on proprietary data. Who is going to invest time & money into something like that when OpenAI says right out of the gate they may not support this model for very long?
Basically OpenAI is telegraphing that this is yet another prototype that escaped a lab, not something that is actually ready for use and deployment.
Yes, it is disgusting. Sadly also very common.
So why is Google relevant to this in any way?
You have missed his point. If the interview questions are such that AI can solve them, they are the wrong questions being asked, by definition. Unless that company is trying to hire a robot, of course.
This sort of comp-sci style exam with quizzes and what not maybe somewhat helps when hiring junior with zero experience fresh out of school.
But why are people with 20+ years of easily verifiable experience (picking up a phone and asking for references is still a thing!) being asked to invert trees and implement stuff like quicksort or some contrived BS assignment the interviewer uses to boost their own ego but with zero relevance to the day to day job they will be doing?
Why are we still wasting time with this? Why is always the default the assumption there that the applicants are all crooked hochstaplers that are lying on their resumes?
99% of jobs come with probationary period anyway where the person can be fired on the spot without justification or any strings attached. That should be more than enough time to see whether the person knows their stuff or not after having passed one or two rounds of oral interviews.
It is good enough for literally every other job - except for software engineering. What makes us the special snowflakes that people are being asked to put up with this crap?
But if you are the only technical person around, who is going to show you what a good or bad practice *in your specific field* is? That you won't find on Stack Overflow or by asking ChatGPT.
Being able to talk to an experienced mentor who knows the field you are working in is invaluable. Unlike learning some framework or design patters or what not, this information you won't find anywhere else.
If you aren't experienced already it is a very hard position to be in, with a huge responsibility and potential to screw up due to inexperience - and be promptly thrown under the bus when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Code reviews by ChatGPT can't compensate for lack of more experienced colleagues.
The best way to grow as a fresh grad is to join a medium sized, established business. There you are going to be a part of a team where you will get to learn the ropes of your field (that's something you won't find in ChatGPT or university) and at the same time the pressure won't be so hard. And while you aren't going to get the perks of working at huge companies like Google or Facebook, you likely won't have to deal with assorted corporate BS that comes with it either.
Only once you get a few years under your belt think about startups, small companies, etc.
Having a good mentor or two is pretty essential because most of knowledge isn't written down and retrievable by LLMs or about some framework or tool. It is the experience of people who have been there before, done it, got burned and learned to not do the same mistake again.
Makes sense.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the (especially) US startup culture in the last maybe 10-20 years. Only very rarely is the goal of the founders and angel investors to build an actual sustainable business.
In most cases the goal is to build enough perceived value by wild growth financed by VC money & by fueling hype that an subsequent IPO will let the founders and initial investors recoup their investment + get some profit on top. Or, find someone to acquire the company before it reaches the end of its financial runway.
And then let the poor schmucks who bought the business hold the bag (and foot the bill). Nobody cares if the company becomes irrelevant or even goes under at that point anymore - everyone who did has has recouped their expense already. If the company stays afloat - great, that's a bonus but not required.
That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.
That assumes your talent actually gets through the automated HR filter after the recruiter has handed your over and collected their commission ...
Normal? Absolutely not. It signals loud and wide that your time is not worth even a reply from the recruiter/HR and you are being treated as a disposable piece of crap. You can imagine how they would treat you if you actually got hired.
There is zero excuse for wasting the candidate's time like this. Even less today with all the "AI" automation the recruiting companies & HR uses - writing a form rejection e-mail is literally a one click affair.
Sad that you didn't consider the content creators, people who's faces, voices, writings, art, personal information, etc. are being used without consent and without any compensation as the ones "being screwed" here.
Doesn't mean that this guy was not a malicious actor, only that one shouldn't be so quick to cast stones without evidence.
Unless there is an explicit suspicion, nobody is going to systematically check all your citations and papers. There are simply too many of these things to do that systematically, for every researcher, grad student or professor.
The universities don't have resources for something like that - that would mean hiring multiple people doing just work like that full time. And it still wouldn't uncover the slightly more sophisticated cases, such as the professor getting a "mandatory citation" on every paper produced by the students working in their lab.
How do you think can a professor publish 20-30 journal papers a year (that's both a very common number and still quite low) when getting a single paper written and shepherded through the review process takes months in the best case and could take even 2 years in the worst for the large journals?
Yes, all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.
I have personally witnessed one guy build essentially an entire fake academic career like this, by pushing grad students to credit him for work he didn't do - and he almost got away with it. He didn't obtain a tenured position at a prestigious European university only because one of the professors in the tenure committee worked with him before and knew how did he obtain those (on paper) stellar research credentials - and vetoed it.
Moreover, most of the metrics like impact factor are just a number. You can't see what they have been calculated from. Research has always been built on individual integrity and honesty. And there will always be bad apples that abuse it.
The motivations and what is on stake (your career, job, grants, etc.) are so skewed that a lot of people feel pushed into cheating like this.
Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them. The whole teaching/learning to test thing - you don't learn to be able to understand and practically use the knowledge but cram to pass the tests and will usually promptly forget most you have "learned" in this way after the tests are over.
Not really a lot more. There are plenty of very good students that are just terrible at tests - either because they don't cope well with time pressure or because they learn in a different way and standardized testing is unable to capture that because of its "least common denominator" focus.
And don't get me started on people with very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia - neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing.
So it is only a cheap to administer and easy to evaluate (just count the points) proxy for actual performance and knowledge that are much harder to objectively assess. But a very poor one.
And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family.
Let's call tests what they are - a cheap and somewhat objective filter to fit the large amount of applicants to the much smaller amount of available places. And don't delude ourselves it has anything to do with quality.
(I am a former university teacher and have done a specialized course in university pedagogy, including assessment)
Don't get me wrong, there there is nothing wrong with walking away from a job or career you hate. But given your obvious lack of experience, I would perhaps suggest a different approach.
You wrote you like tech, I guess you went into software because you like to write code and solve problems. Then the solution is not to dump your career but to find another job that aligns better with your needs.
Just keep in mind that as a junior engineer with no experience (one year really doesn't count as experience yet) you need to keep your expectations realistic and will have to put up with things like asshole/incompetent bosses, unsexy tasks to do, etc. That's the rite of passage at any job/career, you will need to work your way through that. Sadly real life is not what Youtube influencers/millionaires try to make us believe.
For a junior engineer, I would strongly suggest looking for work in an established, mid-sized enterprise. Avoid:
- Startups. You will be doing literally everything at once because the company doesn't have the resources to hire specialists for the various tasks. Yet you don't have the experience or skill to do this yet.
It will be extremely stressful, long hours are the rule plus you have zero job security - you could be unemployed tomorrow because the mistake you (or your boss) made yesterday made the company go bust today. And given the lack of experience the mistakes are inevitable - they are part of the learning process. Don't get lured by a promise of equity - 90% of startups fail and that equity will be worth nothing.
- Large corporations. They pay well, you have a reasonable job security - but you will be spending most of your time dealing with the various corporate BS, sitting in endless meetings and not solving any interesting problems most of the time. And as a junior employee you will be likely the first on the line to be thrown under the bus whenever something goes wrong - or at the inevitable next round of layoffs. You are also unlikely to learn much that could help you to advance your career there.
Go for a middle-sized business (maybe around 100-200 people). That will be established already, so you won't need to worry whether you will get a paycheck this month or not. At the same time there is not as much BS as in the large companies yet. They are likely to be reasonably agile, the development team is not going to be a huge department and most people are likely on a first name basis. You are also less likely to be stuck with a 30 years old rotting codebase and more likely to be working on something that solves problems the customers need today, not giant projects that take two years only to get approved. Try to learn as much as you can from more experienced people there about how the development processes work, how things should be done (and what to avoid), keep your skills sharp.
That is the best way to go about your career in this field, IMO. Certainly not giving up at the literally first obstacle.
This is by design.
And don't get me started on the patent minefield that covers many aspects of printer technology. You will have to license those - or be sued into oblivion.
Good luck!
People calling for "someone" to make open source this or that are usually completely ignoring elementary economics of the endeavor. It really has zero to do with any sort of government tracking dots conspiracy (not all printers do that) or that there is supposedly no demand to print at home (if that was true then HP etc. would have been bankrupt already and not making more crappy consumer printers).
Oh and that completely ignores the elephant in the room - do you think that the fact the printer firmware is by some hypothetical magic open source now will prevent the OEM from DRMing the toner/inks? The DRM is not meant to prevent dedicated individuals to bypass it - only to keep 99% of people who barely know how to put new consumables in from using competitor's supplies. Those are certainly not going to flash firmware without the DRM into their printers en masse.
Most people don't unlock/jailbreak their phones either - they want to use them as phones, not to hack this or that. They don't have the technical skills required either - and won't pay others to do it in any significant quantity. Heck, if you want to hack your DRMed printer you could do that even today already, there are hacks and DRM bypasses for many of those DRMed printers online ...
An open source printer is a mirage and a complete red herring.
Or calling out click-bait and hype now requires filed patents and other "inventor" credentials?
FYI, I have 20+ years research and commercial experience developing virtual reality solutions, including published papers in scientific journals. Unlike patents and far-fetched ideas left for others to sort out, journal papers actually require results to be demonstrated and undergo peer review.
Does that qualify, Mr throwaway account?