I had a new job lined up roughly a week after they broke the news to me. The tradeoff is that I took a 37% reduction in salary.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.
Sure, if you think it’d help. Here’s the message I sent that got me the new job. The context is that they were pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and went into full salesman mode:
- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”
They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.
That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
I love your background. I'm trying really hard to get my work with getting LMs to be able to write with syntactic constraints (like banning the letter E) to convert into a dedicated ML research role for awhile now. Seems it's relatively easy to get a fat title and money but harder to get a mandate to do research fill time.
I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone with influence saw my work and cared.
But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
Keep it up! I believe in you. Keep trying to do research that yiu personally find interesting; doesn’t matter if it’s small, just that you’re into it. That’s always worked like a compass for me.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.