It’s okay, I put my thoughts out there and I appreciate the feedback from other engineers.
It’s actually kind of motivating. I’d interviewed at several places over the last few months and something out of my control always came up and halted the process (remote work closed down, hiring freeze, etc), so I’m definitely feeling a bit down about job prospects right now.
I needed some people to remind me “no, don’t be complacent, keep trying, there’s stuff out there and it’s worth the effort to continue looking”
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
Deliberately vague, half so I can’t be easily identified (though my team’s case is not unique), half so I don’t get in trouble for sharing specific personnel information.
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
My initial offer was $400k total comp (E5), so I didn’t really consider FIRE as an option in the near term considering my spouse is a full-time parent and this area is HCOL.
I’m nowhere close to $5m, and I’m hoping to leave Meta in the next few months. But I’d love to be able to “retire” and work exclusively for companies that match my morals.
I figured the amount I’m donating doesn’t make a huge difference to my FIRE date
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were:
- Working on something I care about
- Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations:
- Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
> They are the only man-made technology in history that we don’t fully understand from first principles
…what? What about bicycles? Ice skates? General anesthetics? I feel like there are a ton of commonly-used man-made items we don’t fully understand from a first-principles perspective.
1. These can only be flown in most class E airspace and class G, so not anywhere close to most airports
2. They are much bigger and more visible than drones
3. The ultralight pilot is inside the aircraft which means “see and avoid” is much more reasonable
It’s hard to compare ultralights to drones IMO as a licensed pilot
Yes, though any subject which trains you to think with mathematical rigor will help.
I switched my major from CS to math midway through my undergrad studies. I have worked at startups and FAANG as a SWE so I have seen these skills in different engineering environments. A few things I’ve seen:
1. My later classes used the Moore Method which made whiteboard interviews much less stressful
2. I can spar with our data scientists and call out BS metrics rigorously in a very political environment at my current company
3. I can sometimes find pathological execution scenarios and bugs faster than my CS coworkers
The one caution is that time spent studying things that aren’t programming needs to be balanced with time spent programming
As for math outside of CS that’s helpful for programming and thinking, modern algebra and category theory can really help in understanding type systems and their limitations. They’re also very accessible when compared to stuff like differential equations and analysis IMO
Fly under sport pilot privileges. All you need is a drivers license.
Reach out to West Desert Aviators in Utah. Several young people in tech fly there. If you can find LSA to fly, light sport isn’t as restrictive of a license as it’s made out to be and you don’t have to live in fear of the FAA yanking your medical
Crazy, I had something that could have escalated to a wrongful arrest with Hertz less than a week ago.
Hertz initially gave me a car with a mechanical problem, so they swapped it out before we had even left the rental car lot.
The attendant at the gate assured me they had updated the paperwork.
They hadn’t. I was on the phone with support for hours trying to fix this. They never fixed it and I had to pay for someone else’s rental. They even told me that the car was not marked as stolen.
In addition, when I returned the car, the attendant looked at me pretty funny and said it was good I never got pulled over.
Nothing got done on this until I threatened to bring my company’s travel coordinator into the mix (I work at a large company that spends a lot on Hertz rentals every year).
Still waiting for a refund of the additional fees they charged for my “second rental car”. The way it was handled by Hertz customer service and the location manager was an absolute joke.
I’m not unique here either, after this experience I went on my company’s internal chat and found tons of stories similar to this.
There is either a big problem with the process at Hertz or a severe bug in their system that they aren’t acknowledging.
I think one would have to have a background in modern algebra and physics to see where the "unification" is useful. Then it becomes a lot more obvious, for example Maxwell's equations can be compressed down to one equation with this type of algebra.
In any case, check section 10 for another application for physics.
From my math undergrad, I feel like generally there are two feelings on this kind of thing:
- No practical application is needed, since studying math is an end in itself
- If there is a practical application, it should be fairly obvious and the author should not have to stoop to the level of trying to enumerate them
I'm not saying I agree, but I think there is part of the math community that doesn't care to enumerate practical applications. Expecting this kind of thing from this area of research may be an uphill battle.
A great article from a friend of mine that brought up thoughts on responsible use of statistics and public perception of statistical models vs qualitative analysis.
I've really appreciated the wording in fivethirtyeight's election forecasting, with an emphasis on the frequentist interpretation of "Biden has an x/100 shot of winning", since I think it's the easiest to formalize in a way that the average US citizen without a mathematical background would understand.
I live in Utah, can confirm this is a huge thing here. Fortunately (I say fortunately because I hate MLMs) the leaders of the dominant religion here have been pretty vocal about being a little smarter with "shady investments", and I think some of them are trying to allude to MLMs. Hopefully they just say it outright some day
You're totally right, I could have worded that differently. I actually posted an infinite field extension that is algebraic elsewhere in this thread, but usually those are tricky and I haven't seen them pop up as often as finite algebraic extensions