The vague term “great” gets used a lot in this post. If possible, wielding more precise concepts regarding what you’re looking for—what counts as “great” in the sense you’re using the term—could be helpful moving forward. By honing in on the particular kind of skill you’re seeking, you’ll help identify those who have those skills. And you may help yourselves confirm which specific skills are truly are essential to the position you’re seeking to fill.
(Also, I think there are more ways to be a “great” software engineer than being able to write a substantial pull request for a major machine learning library with minimal ramp-up time. So other wording can help you be more precise, as well as kinder to engineers who are great in other ways.)
I appreciate the feedback, but the spec is intentionally over-broad rather than over-narrow. I and several other engineers in AI safety have made serious efforts to try and pin down exactly what ‘great software engineering’ is, and—for want of a better phrase—have found ourselves missing the forest for the trees. What we’re after is a certain level of tacit, hard-to-specify skills and knowledge that we felt was best characterised by the litmus test given above.
The vague term “great” gets used a lot in this post. If possible, wielding more precise concepts regarding what you’re looking for—what counts as “great” in the sense you’re using the term—could be helpful moving forward. By honing in on the particular kind of skill you’re seeking, you’ll help identify those who have those skills. And you may help yourselves confirm which specific skills are truly are essential to the position you’re seeking to fill.
(Also, I think there are more ways to be a “great” software engineer than being able to write a substantial pull request for a major machine learning library with minimal ramp-up time. So other wording can help you be more precise, as well as kinder to engineers who are great in other ways.)
I appreciate the feedback, but the spec is intentionally over-broad rather than over-narrow. I and several other engineers in AI safety have made serious efforts to try and pin down exactly what ‘great software engineering’ is, and—for want of a better phrase—have found ourselves missing the forest for the trees. What we’re after is a certain level of tacit, hard-to-specify skills and knowledge that we felt was best characterised by the litmus test given above.