The head of "Safety" at Open AI
The head of "Safety" at Open AI
This is almost too sad to dunk on. People running the world have never had a reflective conversation with a professional trained to help process emotions and healthily cope with the human condition. They're in charge of billions of dollars worth of resources and guiding society's investment into the future. Cooooool
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pretty intense coding background https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilianweng
Literally just assume anybody whose LinkedIn looks like this to be one of the most deranged people you could meet
It's asking me to sign in and I don't wnat to make an account
Is an Angel Investor, worked at Meta and Dropbox before OpenAI
Climbed to staff engineer within 4 years (typical is like 8+ years?), which is the lowest level where coders switch from working class to PMC, and also a level most never reach
Real hustle grindset shit
Staff at 4 YOE screams hyperinflated job title and/or nepotism to me. Even the craziest grindset pod people I've worked with couldn't pull that off legitimately.
They do have a PhD. May have given them some level of seniority or early boost compared to peers? A "8 years of relevant experience" type situation where 4 of them are the PhD. I don't know how seriously that's taken compared to direct experience and immediate work product in the industry, though.
Ah, the PhD would get you fast tracked to at least senior so that makes more sense. I'm grumpy about PhDs getting fast tracked though; in my experience academia is a shit show for programming standards and they tend to end up leading teams that are massive problem children. I'm in DevOps though so I'm heavily biased.
Nah, companies mostly just treat a PHD as an extra two years of work experience.
She does have PhD so probably started mid level instead of entry
I also thought inflation but checked levels.fyi and apparently it's slightly deflated lmao
I'm not an engineer so it's not like I'm personally offended by this, but I always bristle at the stolen valor of using "engineer" in the job title. Fucking programmers (glorified logic nerds) trying to fool gullible investors and the public into thinking of them in a more respectable light by ripping off the prestige of an entirely dissimilar and unrelated field. It's not even that they don't deserve some semblance of respect for their work (if it was actually being used for prosocial development instead of facilitating ever greater exploitation and monetizing attention spans), but they don't deserve to be conflated with engineers who, generally speaking, are always contributing towards something tangible and arguably beneficial in the world. (Except for designers of like, hostile architecture or planned obsolescence and stuff like that)
Not a bad take at all, but there are legitimately programmers out there that do work equitable to real engineering, mostly in aerospace or core-level banking. The industry at large plays so fast and loose with everything it'd be ridiculous to call typical webshit 'engineering' without making anyone who has to go through getting permits to do their job break out into hives.
A mechE recently told me "Become an engineer! Every scientist eventually becomes one."
Tired of these Dunning Kruger cases encroaching into every field thinking they're god's gift unto invention (no standing on shoulders of giants for these brain geniuses) because they cheated through linear algebra & slept through a 1 credit ethics class.
pushing back on this. whether something is "engineering" depends on the character of the work, not the effect on the world. I used to think it was stolen valor, and called myself a programmer or software developer, but most engineers who become programmers view it as a (new, cowboy, kind of fucked up) field of engineering. There is even some explicit task overlap at the fringes, especially in robotics and microelectronics. Not much difference between a control engineer and a software engineer when you're both writing a PID controller. Broadly, devs are worse at teaching, MUCH better at tooling, and generally less "professional" (for better and worse).
engineers who, generally speaking, are always contributing towards something tangible and arguably beneficial in the world
There's lots of visible, tangible engineering (except for process, systems, supply chain, etc) but quite often it's harmful. Engineers build bombs and fighter jets. They make assembly lines that hurt workers to save money, and apps that are addictive. They make prisons. Some engineers have formal codes of ethics that don't seem to stop them working for Raytheon. Blame the product managers (well, capitalism).
non-tech engineering isn't as legit as you think. there are lots of 'real' engineers with that education and job title who don't have a PE
Me, i'm one of those! Went to Engineering school, worked for 6 months, and decided it wasn't my thing. I could theoretically get a PE if I chose to do it, but I'm OK not working in engineering.
FWIW I've heard of people offered Staff SWE right out of grad school. It's not unheard of with a post-bachelor's degree.
IMO, Facebook internship and boring new grad role at Dropbox is not impressive. the bump to staff engineer (and change to ML) at Affirm is unusual
Where are you seeing Angel Investor?
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