natalyarostova

I think part of the problem is that the upper bound on neural nets, as far as we can tell, might very well be general intelligence, and things like self-driving cars, and other nearly magical use-cases that seem within reach. Whereas tree based models, for a series of reasons, many related to scaling, don't offer that feeling of limitless potential.

Definitely not my experience in big tech data science. 30-50% of data scientists I work with don’t have a PhD, and took the self-taught hacker path, and earn just as much as PhDs. I probably earned a total of a million bucks by time I was as old as the average PhD data scientist hire out of academia.

+1

To add to this, I do not have a phd in econ, but did what you recommended and work as a data scientist with PhD economists. If you do this, you will make just as much as they do.

Try not to feel this is your one chance and you only have two options. You can get offers again. In addition, you could get work as a machine learning engineer in industry, either now or in a few years. You could spend another year doing deep learning, but dedicate 10% of your time to networking in industry and staying good at interviews, then reevaluate later.

Scientific method is undergoing intense changes in methodology. I suspect in 50 years the way causal inference is done will in many areas be radically different.

I suspect the future is just a good browser excel, rather than a Linux custom excel.

I assume they are working on it, and in the meantime employees are going out of their way to help where possible in a way that doesn’t scale.

After doing 5 years of interviews, I think part of the issue is Amazon doesn’t really do onboarding, so everyone is scared of making an L6 offer, because the new hire is expected to perform equal to an L6 who has already been at Amazon for years, on day 1.

I quit Amazon a few months ago for the same reason. Holy shit Amazon culture does not work over video. I used to work hard, but I would stay late with my cool team and we’d build things. That stopped happening and I burned out.

They stopped being able to hire seniors easily. So I quit, because working with 8 people 1 year out of college, and myself with 7 years exp, was awful.

Yes

Rofl

Not sure what that has to do with anything. Dying in public from drug addiction suicide on the streets of the tenderloin is about as bad as it gets. People aren’t choosing it through rational analysis of alternatives and shelter trauma. They choose it because it lets them fulfill their 8 hour dopamine cycle.