I was shocked that this was the case and wished I knew about this sooner. Also had kids in mid-30s and it is complicated to say the least. I thought 40 was late (as had some friends succeed at that age).
305 karma · joined June 15, 2017
Comment was really there to help kickstart discussion on what jobs/sectors/companies will continue to hire (e.g. someone posted an insight that defense demand is strong). I still have my job at a big name tech firm but I don't know how others (or myself) will be able to get a job at the same/similar brand (doing AI/infra) in the next year. As others have commented, companies benefiting from low-interest, high demand will be under belt-tightening for a while (not even sure if we will be out of this mess in a year).
I spent my life in corporate. Lesson 6 (Planning is often the highest leverage work) touched something inside me. In a large corp, I have complained how slow we move, how things are planned to a ridiculous level, how there are people whose job it is to just to this function (or something related like strategy). It is interesting to see a start-up that follows the hacker ethos, but then gets in trouble due to lack of such functions.
Intel had the Movidius stick and the openvino platform. Not sure I have seen anything recent there as well.
CES is coming up .. maybe we'll see something new. It is a hard business to crap this Edge stuff.
This is one reason the energy Windfall taxes being proposed everywhere seem ludicrous to me. If you tax energy producers at a high marginal rate, they will actually be disincentivized from producing a lot of energy. This is basic economics/human nature.
Rant Over .. I also had a thought for the OP. In Web dev (and other kinds of SW dev), you kick it hard enough and it works. I had a job offer at a famous company where they wanted me to do a vision model to detect theft. I got the offer but didn't take the job .. one factor was if it didn't work with my existing toolbox, what does that mean for me? Do I get fired or I quit myself? This was a serious question I posed to myself.
In research gigs, you take on hard problems and try your best. In an industrial/startup setting, AI of hard problems requires incredible training and self-confidence at the leadership level. A data engineer does not require this hard stuff and you just work under some scientist. But be aware the turn around time for experiments is very fast (like the scientists had 5 new ideas on the whiteboard by the time the dev team walked from the conf room back to their desks). I don't even know how my engineers keep up with it.
I think AI jobs where you do actual innovation/exploration are incredibly hard and require a ton of investment (personally in terms of a near 24/7 job and your employer). Even then success isn't guaranteed. I think there are much easier jobs out there (like Cloud, Security) that have an equally bright career outlook .
Cost-of-living in your area, Years of experience and Education are also key factors to balance.
"The Game" - very immature and sophomoric book. I was given this book by an acquaintance who was also geeky like me. I was painfully shy of girls until grad school, and this book gave me much needed confidence to talk to the opposite gender. A lot of the content is garbage but this book was definitely a life changer.
"Hobbit" - Great story that got me into the LOTR. Shorter than LOTR and hence why I put that on this list. Also about being brave I suppose. I'm seeing a pattern here.
"Good Omens" - Not sure why but when I read this book, I was convinced it was the best book ever written (and I used to read a lot of books in youth). Just witty writing and the occult I suppose.
I skimmed it and it is not bad.
After this, perhaps a university-level data structures course?
I would not recommend a bootcamp from what I have heard (I have proper CS degrees, and did consider one elite bootcamp back in the day so did some research)
I was quite poor growing up, and I recall buying a 3K machine when I started undergrad (that was crap hardware by today's standard). And i have no doubt that having this machine helped me get my first job, and things got better from then. If you are in CS, think of it as an investment, and make it pay off!
Btw, I am trying to be positive .. pls don't construe anything here as negative. I appreciate that money is tight for a lot of folks. Paying 10% interest to buy a 3K machine is not a good idea!! I just skimped a lot as a student, and some of it was quite pointless. I wish someone explained this to me, and hence my comment.
If you are in a situation where you'd have to take a loan to buy a system, pls don't feel like you need a GPU to do anything useful. I am certain one can make do with just colab and a web browser. Good luck to all the students out there!! Life is hard at that stage .. it gets far easier once you have a paying job in the field.
The 3090 machine gets about the same use as the 1070 in my case. While it is nice to have more GPU memory to have huge batches and train things faster, this is a quality of life improvement/bragging to be honest. Serious work in some sub-areas needs multi-GPUs or enterprise grade hardware (e.g. A100s).
Software-wise, I just use Pytorch/Pytorch lignting/keras, and anaconda.
Edit: I used to build my own machines in my younger days. The two machines I spoke of above are alienware. Got them on black friday sales. Cost-wise, they were ridiculously cheap for the power they give/impact on my career.
In the stock market, there is an evergrowing pool of securities getting sequestered away into pension schemes and RRSPs. You can change what security you are in, but people/funds seldom get out of the market. When you cash our of your retirement (before actual retirement), there are huge tax disincentives to do so. For housing, people generally have a progression as they move to larger houses (as they have more kids, or kids get older). If all houses continue to get expensive, you just always stay in the housing market (well, until you go to a retirement home or expire).
Both seem to remind me of the classic definition of a ponzi scheme, except housing is a basic necessity. We are basically saying there is an evergrowing mountain of wealth - you just can't spend it till you retire.
I usually bottle it in, but wrote the above post as a release. I'm definitely luckier than a good fraction of the planet. I also truly believe that at some point, we really need to stop blaming our parents, and take ownership for our own actions. It is just really hard some days, to face up to the missed opportunities.
Now that I have kids, I imagine advising myself as if I was advising my kids at some point in the future. That has really worked wonders. I'd advise my own kid to say c'est la vie, and move forward in life with optimism and confidence :)
I had a great education/CV early in my career, and had the opportunity to interview at some of the top most companies prior to their IPO (some when they were tiny companies). Google, Facebook, Stripe and maybe 3 more that went on to be billion dollar exits. I screwed up every single time. Either I did not take the interview seriously, or took a more prestigious academic job compared to the start up opportunity. Talk about being in the right place, at the right time and still missing out. I have barely paid off a small fraction of my starter home (no longer in the Bay area). I really wonder if it is just luck or more complex than that. (Good) Luck got me the right opportunity,but it can't just be (Bad) luck that snatched away all those opportunities from materializing? Clear, I made extremely bad decisions, missed out on the greatest wealth creation event in history, and must live with this till my end.
Edit. There is a rich-dad, poor-dad point I'd like to make. My parents were extremely bad with investments and not very educated. This made me chase the higher prestige academic jobs as opposed to the lucrative startups. Also, when my white friends (with moderately-rich parents) were buying houses at 5% down, I said they were crazy and I was paying off 5% interest education loans, saving up for a bigger down-payment, buying my car for cash, etc. My parents went through the days of 20% interest and never understood the power of leverage. They passed on risk-aversion to me. Even now, I understand the power of leverage, but am still scared to use it.
For the non-DL crowd, Transformers are a tsunami in deep learning for the past few years. They are topping benchmarks in many subfields. I do research professionally and this work is amazingly useful for people like me.
I found one of my old File Systems text books the other day .. maybe I'll brush up on that with C++. Defn excited by async io in general, and totally unclear on how that works with modern C++. I guess boost:asio is a good starting point. Appreciate the pointer! In the old days, I'd spawn a bunch of threads but that is definitely old school (gotta checkout coroutines in C++!). I also fell in love with Systems programming in my youth writing socket software. So that is also a nice suggestion.