jak22
1mo ago
I can see how a Philosophy PHD would maybe help for a AI Research role, but I would assume those roles would be hiring more for CS or Stats PHDs no? Is there something about Philosphy PhDs I'm missing?
Also, I would like to avoid going back to school if I can. As I think I do already have a pretty robust skillset that could already be productive in these roles, I think it's more about the signaling game for me to find my way into these roles.
jak22
1mo ago
I work for Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte recruits pretty heavily out of the college I went to where I graduated with a major in Business Analytics and minors in Computer Science and Statistics. And I did a pretty heavy amount of personal projects in that time that I had listed on my resume. Some of which include:
- Kaggle Competition - Computer Vision Analysis on Cancer Detection through images
- Senior Project - Trying to predict crypto prices from news article's title's sentiments (This was prior to chatgpt being a thing)
Within Deloitte consulting they have a few a lot of different tracks they hire out of. But the recruiter I talked to was looking for 2 types of candidates, engineers and business consultants. Having my major be in business made me think they would want to hire me for the business major, but the recruiter looked at my resume and said, "no, your an engineer, we're going to try and hire you as an engineer". The interview process there wasn't too bad and I passed pretty easily. Although when I started working, I quickly realized that Deloitte doesn't have too many clients who hire for software engineers, and the ones that do, Deloitte passes the actual coding work off to a team in India to save cost. So given my goal was to find a role that would let me code and would be a role that didn't get outsourced to India, I found 2 possible clients who would let me do that.
- One of the FAANG Companies doing Data Engineering work
- Doing Cloud Integrations (AWS, GCP, Azure) projects for banks.
I chose option 1, and I've been doing that for the last 3 years.
As for pay, They started me at 80k, 3 years later I make 115k.
jak22
1mo ago
I have been working as a contractor for a FAANG company as a Data Engineer for the last 3 years. And I really need a change of pace. I would like to ideally do work in AI Safety research, but barring that I would like to do Ai/SW Engineering where I work on a real product. Does anyone have advice on how I can break into those roles?
I wrote a larger explanation of what I want at a job on my substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154032964?source=queue But in general I'd love to get thoughts on how to make that transition.
I have a very similar set of views / experience to this I'd like to share.
I became an atheist when I was 11. Like most of my fellow gen Z's who converted to atheism, I snuck my nose up at all things religion. Beautiful churches started to feel like their was deception seeping through the walls. Thankfully I've always kept my child-like curiosity, so I was never hit with the overt cynicism a lot of kids my age had, but that's a different story. My overall cynicism has begun to wane over the last few years. But I had an absolutely striking experience while in Japan this last year that really made me start seeing the wonder again.
I was at Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto at around 8 at night by myself, and I wanted to see the full shrine before the bullet trains closed at 11 because my hostel was in Osaka. So to be able to satisfy both conditions of:
I decided to run the shrine rather than walk it. But as I started to run, I noticed these beautiful sub shrines with saisen-bakos. There was something about just running bast these beautiful pieces of architecture like it was just a background really bothered me. Like I was missing the real point of the shrines, and possibly a very fundamental human experience. So instead of running by each of these shrines, I decided to to stop at each and every one of them (I think there were about 30 of them) to do a Shinto prayer that a local friend of mine taught me.
At first, doing this felt extremely awkward, like I was trying to fake religion or something. But then as I decided to do what every self-help Youtube video has told me to do, say something I'm grateful for. So each shrine became a combination of a Shinto prayer and a gratefulness prayer. And at some point, this process of running and praying became extremely meditative. And I started to feel a connection to what my pre-11 year old self would of called God. I still don't believe in a Christian god per say, I'm more of an Agnostic at this point, but I do think I felt what people across all religions feel when they go to their religious place of worship to pray. That moment had a pretty profound effect on me, and my appreciation for religious spaces is tremendously higher than it used to be.
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