The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Maybe go back to school for a Philosophy PhD?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry, doesn't answer your question, but would you be comfortable sharing how much your current job pays and how you got into it?
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:
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link