- laidoffamazonIt's not a conspiracy theory. It's basically a bribe to Chamath, Don Jr. and Sacks.
- At Amazon, level is public. Microsoft, only the title (Senior etc) is visible not the precise level is visible is my impression. At Google, it can be public but apparently can also be hidden. At Facebook it's always hidden.
I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.
- The levels are a real thing, but "navigating the NDA minefield" is not, it's just something Googler's say to make themselves feel more special
- Why does OP's linkedin say Senior then?
- For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.
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The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.
If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.
I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.
- The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC
The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.
- I don’t think you need to flash a degree you simply need to get in to get a life of luxury. It’s not like I can go to the Yale club in NYC.
- I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)
- As someone too inferior to get into one it sure doesn’t seem that way
- I have some doubts about this, or at least what your definition of dirt poor is.
The ability required to get into an ivy is so significant I don’t see how someone could fail to make substantial sums if they wanted to.
- BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)
- I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.
Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?
There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.
- I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.
- What about what I said made you think I said everyone there had a trust fund? I have a problem with homeless to Harvard as much as I have a problem with billionaires kids at Yale. Do you not understand this? How can I be more clear?
- I hate everyone involved in this. It’s like a confluence of every type of perma-victim with immense privilege.
- My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.
- Sure. I had a lot of help from Claude Opus 4.5, but it was roughly:
- Using pyscenedetect to split each video on a per scene level
- Using the decord library https://github.com/dmlc/decord to pull frames from each scene at a particular sample rate (specific rate I don't have handy right now, but it was 1-2 per scene)
- Aggregating frames in batches of around 256 frames to be normalized for CLIP embedding on GPU (had to re-write the normalization process for this because the default library does it on CPU)
- Uploading the frames along with metadata (timestamp, etc) into a vector DB, in my case Qdrant running locally along with a screenclip of the frame itself for debugging.
I'm bottlenecked by GPU compute so I also started experimenting with using Modal for the embedding work too, but then vacation ended :) Might pick it up again in a few weeks. I'd like to be able to have a temporal-aware and potentially enriched search so that I can say "Seek to the scene in Oppenheimer where Rami Malek testifies" and be able to get a timestamped clip from the movie.
- I split per scene using pyscenedetect and sampled from each. Distance is via cosine similarity- I fed it into qdrant
- It’s not difficult to hack this together with CLIP. I did this with about a tenth of my movie collection last week with a GTX 1080 - though it lacks temporal understanding so you have to do the scene analysis yourself
- The 701 did run XP, even came pre installed with it on some models in later 2007!