mailshanx

What do you mean by having an "intact career"? Did leaving too early harm your career, and if yes, how so?

Can you recommend any resources to learn this better?

Could you elaborate more on that or perhaps give specific illustrative examples of how one may do so? This will benefit a lot of us at FAANG. Thanks!

Something that always bothered me when I read posts on Google's blogs: why is it that it's always authored by a PM? Why can't perhaps a senior engineer also write an announcement post occasionally?

Yes, the names of the engineers on the team are present in the acknowledgement section: but, this is a single line at the bottom of the post, whereas the name of the PM and the fact that he is the author is featured prominently below the title. This pattern is common across many product/OSS library announcements.

Sure, one could argue that the PM has a holistic view of the product or library being announced, and that developing this perspective is in fact their job. But surely a sufficiently senior engineer can (and often does) have an equally holistic, or perhaps even more insightful overview. At least sometimes. Even if this were not the case, why not acknowledge everyone's contributions at the same place in the article?

I think this is symptomatic of the ubiquitous class divide between the "suits" and "nerds" in the corporate world.

Does Stripe pay at FAANG level? Even outside the USA?

Look at DataRobot - they are massively successful at this point, and I think the key is that they didn't release the source.

Open sourcing the core solution hugely dilutes your value proposition - I hope that you will reconsider your decision.

Congratulations, I read your comments on the Google Auto ML thread a few days ago with great interest.

If Auto ML has commercial value, why are you open-sourcing it?

I think it would be a bad idea to open-source your solution, unless you plan on competing on services, rather than an Auto ML product.

Thanks for taking the time to write it down - very fascinating indeed!

Do you know if there are any other markets other than the USA where a competent (but not necessarily celebrity-famous) dev can make 300-400k a year?

For many good devs, immigrating to the USA is close to impossible in these times. Would be nice to know if these kinds of salaries are attainable outside the states.

>> Its on the http://vanishingradient.net/ (now defunct), with the small "i"

Ah - thanks, its amazing how I tend to become "blind" to errors in my own writing!

Great point about the "cto" suffix! I once applied for a CTO position, and saved the tailored version of my resume at that time with a "cto" suffix. Since then I have been using modified versions of that resume, but I must get rid of the suffix now.

I held the top 1% rank in 2014. I'm not active on Kaggle anymore. They have since changed the way they calculate rankings, and you lose your rank if you don't stay active. As a result, while I still have my Kaggle profile, its now unranked. I figure its easier to explain this when asked, rather than link to a profile page that seems to contradict the claimed achievement.

Thank you so much, I appreciate it!

>> I see a few grammatical errors, "i"

Do you mean I'm using small-letter "i" somewhere? I triple-checked, but can't seem to find that anywhere?

>> If you use google link, I would suggest doing analytics tracking to see how many times its clicked

That's a great idea!

>> The "Subnero" link is broken by the way

Thanks for catching that!

>> Make sure the PDF is OCR readable, and make sure there is an accompaning .docx format as well

I suspect its not OCR readable, and there is no .docx version either - the disadvantages of making your resume with Latex!

Would you be so kind as to look at my resume and give some feedback? I know I'm an internet stranger asking for your time - I'd understand if you don't want to do it, but I'll be very grateful if you did! :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n41w2zja8au26wp/shankar_resume_cto...

Wouldn't you consider AI / ML to be a specialization of data science?

Could you share what company is this? Are you hiring?

Wow, that's an awesome salary! What do you do for a living, and how did you get there?

Is there a link to your project?

Interesting perspective! As an engineer contemplating SG, I would love to hear your Singapore story - what did you find there, and what did you eventually do?

Care to share your career story?

Do you have a link where we can learn more about you / your startup?

Do you know of anyone who has done this? I'd love to buy them coffee!

That's an inspiring story. Do you advertise yourself as a generalist or a specialist? When it comes to the actual role, how important do you feel is raw engineering ability versus managerial and political skills?

Wow, the quality of articles is excellent! How did you go about collecting a dataset for your ML model?

That's really prolific! How do you find the time to create so many projects?

Maybe he already cashed out? We increasingly hear of founders taking money off the table by selling a part of their share when it comes time to raise a series-B or later round. SoundCloud was likely well past the series-B stage, and i wouldn't be surprised if the founder already has a few million in the bank.

>> "... and also make staggeringly high offer"

How high are we talking about? Let's say around ~5 yrs exp dev who would otherwise be considered intermediate level elsewhere spends the equivalent of 3-6 months of full time effort in preparation: what comp can such a candidate expect to negotiate in the big4/5?

Ironically, it is a cargo-cult rant against cargo-culting!

Can anyone shed light on how an machine learning focussed software engineer or data scientist might get a piece of the action? Specifically, how might such a person land a role that has potential to pay say, 300k+ ?

Thanks for taking the time to describe your experiences, i found them very touching to read. It reminded me of my own recent volunteering experiences, which also happen to be with disabled children.

Would love to hear more about your experiences, both at various startups as well as job hunting. What are some of the more memorable startup experiences you have had? What kind of roles did you try applying for, and how did recruiters / hiring managers react?

Thank you, this is the best HN comment i have read in a year (or possibly more)!

Your solution to the anagram problem is very ingenious, indeed. I have seen this question a bunch of times and know all the "standard" approaches - but your solution, which i've never heard of before, is correct, clever and far superior. Kudos to you for coming up with it under such stressful conditions!

Your description of the interview process is very sad. The interviewers' attitudes and response induced an icky feeling in me.

I think that the attitude you encountered at Kaggle is an artifact of rather poor quality, insecure and insufficiently experienced / accomplished engineers. Whenever i interact with really accomplished and senior technical people, the conversations tend to be of stellar quality - they like to discuss actual past work in depth, are able to comprehend new and (perhaps unusual to them) concepts, and are generally a lot more respectful and pleasant. On the other hand, everything you described reeks of junior, inexperienced and rather insecure technical talent.

This reminds me of my own very-first tech interview. I had spent 5 years in a research lab, working on autonomous vehicles, writing software for things like signal processing algorithms, error correction codes, ML / reinforcement learning algorithms optimised to run on power-constrained devices and the like.

I went to interview with a VC-funded startup. They were looking for "experts in signal processing and machine learning experts". I figured my years of signal processing / ML experience might be a good fit. After the initial pleasantries, i get asked "How will you design a server that can detect anagrams of any word in the english language?"

For the life of me, i couldn't come up with a reasonable solution. I went home and hung my head in shame.