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Good news is that a year in consulting isn't long enough to look like a detriment. Bad news is that the job market is crap right now.

Is anyone aware of any firms that do formal-methods-like activities

Don't limit yourself to what you studied in your PhD. A big chunk of the commercial research position will be focused on AI.

Has anyone got experience making a shift from a non-technical to a technical role?

Don't think of it as a shift from non-technical to technical role. Think of it as "I finished my CS PhD about a year ago and now I'm looking for a research/software job".

It's not as big of a leap from using Google or Stackoverflow as it might seem on the surface.

Today I got technical feedback on an assessment (making a gRPC server in Rust)

Did you interview at Helsing? Pretty sure that their test was something like this.

I don't understand why Python gets shit for being a slow language when it's slow but no credit for being fast when it's fast just because "it's not really Python".

If I write Python and my code is fast, to me that sounds like Python is fast, I couldn't care less whether it's because the implementation is in another language or for some other reason.

psql is good but how do you manage long multi line queries and saved collections of queries to reuse? or connections to multiple databases?

It's not a good UI, at least not on Mac. It's kind of clunky, confusing and slow. I don't know if there are many better free alternatives though.

Diet of coca-cola, sweets and dry humor.

Why do you? I don’t understand your logic.

5. Be part of a new team.

Your ethics are leading you to believe this. For other people it doesn’t make sense at all that a computer program should have rights. It makes even less sense to people who know what a computer program is.

At some point, they will get some basic rights

I don't know how to express how deeply stupid this sounds while still being polite and constructive.

I genuinely think that this whole argument is a waste of time.

What matters is whether the outputs are useful and the outputs don't change based on whether you call it "thought", "AGI" or "probabilistic word selection".

Seems like a very bad reason to switch. Data engineering is different (and much worse than SWE in my opinion), and it's not like you're certain that you can avoid LC interviews if you try to switch.

One of the things that has changed is typing - you can and should type check your Python code with tools like mypy or pyright. Even better if you use a strict mode for mypy which forces you to type hint everything.

Also check out dataclasses, Pydantic (most of my code these days is gluing together dataclasses and Pydantic models), FastAPI, PyTorch if you're interested in ML.

You should transition to a forum that only you can read.

Aaand I've had a long series of "Something went wrong" errors in the couple of hours since I wrote the comment above.

For me it works but is very slow.

Patrick Boyle posted an interview on this topic with the author of the article just an hour ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb5kngSrrsw

So have job openings overall like you can see from the graph in the article. I don't see a reason to single out AI.

What's your point, that I shouldn't criticise him because he has a wikipedia page?

A bad article is bad regardless of what the author has achieved during his career as a whole.

So what is the Oxide hiring process?

Interviews shouldn’t necessarily take one form; interviewers should feel free to take a variety of styles and approaches

I guess we still don't know.

Author: Bryan Cantrill

the act of writing — like so much else that we do — requires not only the ability to create wholly new material, but also the ability to reflect, correct, revise, and polish.

Oh Bryan, you could have spent your time doing some actual work instead of being pretentious to the tune of 4700 words and still not saying anything useful to anyone.

You have an edge in the job market for things you've done before. When you jump into a new language/domain, you're at a disadvantage - it's the exact opposite of having an edge.

Doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it but the question you should be asking yourself is more like which of the two you want to do, whether it's realistic to overcome the disadvantage you're putting yourself at, and whether the switching cost is worth it.

This is assuming that you're considering a language/domain switch; if you want to keep working on whatever you're working now and think that adding Rust or ML to your CV will help you - it probably won't.

Because it's a good name, and names are brands, not some legal commitment to anyone's intepretation of what the company does.

Apple don't sell produce, Tesla have nothing to do with the Serbian-American inventor, Amazon aren't related to the river, and the Walt Disney company kept his name after he died.

Physical exercise is the thing that prevents cognitive decline the most.

(i.e. say building a least squares model without using sklearn, etc.)

It's 2023, when I read "build models from scratch" I think about training a model from scratch and not using any pretrained models.

For your definition, there's no good use case apart from learning, or making a custom implementation for something that doesn't exist in a library.

It tests whether you can write a simple loop with a couple of ifs - not being able to do it is definitely an indicator that you won't be able to complete more advanced programming tasks. And pretty much any other programming task is more advanced.