Thanks for writing this! I like the aptitudes framing.
With respect to software engineering, I would add that EA orgs hiring web developers have historically had a hard time getting the same level of engineering talent as can be found at EA-adjacent AI orgs.* I have a thesis that as the EA community scales, the demand for web developers building custom tools and collaboration platforms will grow as a percentage of direct work roles. With the existing difficulty in hiring and with most EAs not viewing web development as a direct work path, I expect the shortage to continue.
Also as practical career advice, I’d recommend many people who already know how to code somewhat to try get a software engineering job at ~any tech company /​ startup. That company will spend months training you and the problems you’ll be solving will be much more useful for learning than the toy problems offered by a bootcamp.
* This is not so much to cast aspersions on myself and my colleagues, as to agree with the post that the level of engineering talent in AI labs is very high.
I mostly agree, though I would add: spending a couple years at Google is not necessarily going to be super helpful for starting a project independently. There’s a pretty big difference between being good at using Google tooling and making incremental improvements on existing software versus building something end-to-end and from scratch. That’s not to say it’s useless, but if someone’s medium-term goal is doing web development for EA orgs, I would push working at a small high-quality startup. Of course, the difficulty is that those are harder to identify.
Thanks for writing this! I like the aptitudes framing.
With respect to software engineering, I would add that EA orgs hiring web developers have historically had a hard time getting the same level of engineering talent as can be found at EA-adjacent AI orgs.* I have a thesis that as the EA community scales, the demand for web developers building custom tools and collaboration platforms will grow as a percentage of direct work roles. With the existing difficulty in hiring and with most EAs not viewing web development as a direct work path, I expect the shortage to continue.
Also as practical career advice, I’d recommend many people who already know how to code somewhat to try get a software engineering job at ~any tech company /​ startup. That company will spend months training you and the problems you’ll be solving will be much more useful for learning than the toy problems offered by a bootcamp.
* This is not so much to cast aspersions on myself and my colleagues, as to agree with the post that the level of engineering talent in AI labs is very high.
I mostly agree, though I would add: spending a couple years at Google is not necessarily going to be super helpful for starting a project independently. There’s a pretty big difference between being good at using Google tooling and making incremental improvements on existing software versus building something end-to-end and from scratch. That’s not to say it’s useless, but if someone’s medium-term goal is doing web development for EA orgs, I would push working at a small high-quality startup. Of course, the difficulty is that those are harder to identify.