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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Are they a serious researcher in ML with insights into some of the most interesting and complicated intersections of computer science and analytical mathematics, or a promptfondler that earns 3x the former's salary for a nebulous AI startup that will never create anything of value to society? Read on to find out!
do i have to
Welcome to the future! Suffering is mandatory!
as a professional abyss-starer, I'm going to talk to my union about this
I'm a Software Engineer at Amazon, and have worked on compositional and large language models for the last four years. I'm not a researcher, but I do work in applied and research science. My work is mostly to facilitate the science work and create scalable ways to make experiments work.
Is thereA specific reason you picked Amazon?
Money, mostly.
Aside from that, I joined fully aware of how cutthroat it is, and naively assumed that because I had succeeded in other places I'd be fine here. The churn is 100% real.
I'm still grateful to have worked here. It sounds cool to say I work in AI, I have enough money saved to take 2+ years off if I wanted, and it's been good to work on something that millions of people use - regardless of my own thoughts on if it's useful/good or not.
Did they pay more than competitors? How did it compare?
Outside of big tech and quants, yes. In the UK especially, salaries vary wildly. Some amazing software engineers might be lucky to make £50k, while someone in big tech might make that in RSU's alone in a given year, with a salary twice as big again.
With that said, I'd find a middle ground to be nice, decent pay for decent WLB.
Wait 150k-200k is considered good in the UK? I’d have thought you’d be getting offers in the millions/year.
The average salary for London is ~£60k, and substantially less outside (I'm not from London).
Salaries here are much lower than that of the US, and lower than some European countries. Despite all of this, it also means that if you save enough from a high-paying job you can supplement your income from your interest and pursue other things.
Tax is also very high, but the other side of this is that healthcare is free, and worker protections are higher than in the US.
IMO, moving to the UK or parts of Europe is something many people in tech should do once they've earned seven figures in tech in the US. Despite lower income, they could probably live off of their interest and retire somewhere with an arguably equal quality of life.