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Comment by brizii | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I follow. They weren't pleased with the speed at which you completed tasks? I feel this might be specific to your company. I find this to be a very desirable trait, considering most professors at my university won't take undergraduate researchers on the basis that they simply don't complete tasks as quickly as a PhD would. Different contexts but I feel this example still holds some merit.

Also, we're entering a paradigm in which a lot of research is constrained by compute, and it can be very difficult to just "do AI research projects" when such projects involved training policies in virtual environments or designing the next transformer, for instance.

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Professors, of course, don't feel threatened by students so want them to be as good as possible. But in a company where I had the same pay and title as the AI researchers, just different fields of work, me applications, they research, they realized real quick that if I kept doing 2-3 times more tasks than they were doing I would get experience with everything they knew. Everybody wants to have their own little field where they are the boss. A newcomer that keeps putting their nose everywhere might not be very desirable. I knew what I was doing and I knew the risk I was running. I was hoping that the project manager would support me. The manager did not support me, I was out.

I feel you.

Still, after hearing this story, my takeaway is not "Do not fix AI researchers' code if you want to become an AI researcher."

Rather, "Good news! It turns out a software engineer has much to offer AI researchers! However, as all too often, beware of politics - you need to find an organization where the AI folks won't be threatened by your fast work but will welcome you."

I wager in some part of your analysis you're not dead on the money but in broad strokes this all rings true. The political acumen necessary to survive as a programmer is intense, it is one advantage black programmers i've met had a better handle on than white programmers who are more often autism-spectrum n therefore terrible at office politics, cept when being oblivious is advantageous which it can be. It was ironic in the scheme of racial stereotypes present in American culture, that both black coders were employed while the white coders were not, this was in a hacker house, but it was simply because they were better coders. No issues there. We got along great, but in terms of office politics, n without being aggressors either, j very good instincts. It isn't talked about in plain terms enough even on HN, well i guess it is discussed a lot, but never like "alright, here's the strat if you're facing X" like you talk about in the face of other commentors's naysaying.

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