> I see people report learning stuff, working on side projects, etc etc on HN. How?
1. people on the internet are full of shit
2. Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) takes a 3 hour break from work to, quote: "have dinner and spend time with family". Then has another work/thinking session. Give it a try. That's what I'm trying to do
I don’t want to defend the idea as an actual product too much because I’m mainly interested in it as an experiment. It would be revealing to have a “God’s eye” view of the labor market even if it has an asterisk.
If people and jobs were fungible you’d be able to skip the interview process too. I definitely agree that it’s imperfect though. Maybe with some filtering it would be possible to narrow down candidates qualified enough for an interview.
if that is true then why does everyone need to do bullshit coding interviews instead of being hired for their projects and experience, degrees and track record?
Because employers _want_ people to be fungible. The quest to quantify and systematize hiring is a Quixotic effort at solving real challenges, but it persists because nobody has come up with an actual solution.
a side, but a sincere question: what do Data Scientists do and what can I expect one to produce as productive output?
I've worked as an SDE on data engineering projects myself (Spark / Hadoop stuff) and have friends who are ML researches and develop things like better recommendation results. Never met a data scientist.
It's pretty nebulous, but the work output of a data scientist would be a predictive model, where those results are either useful for some business unit (forecasting), or capable of being shipped as part of a software system and product.
Using Uber as an example, a data scientist would figure out the algorithm/model for assigning the next driver when you request a ride, the model for the shortest route (maybe), and delivering a model to correct GPS works in cities with huge buildings so drivers know exactly where to pick people up when they stand next to skyscrapers.
It requires a ton of infrastructure to do good data science work, since you not only need to validate that the model works using the exact same data in testing/production, but you need to take code that a non-SWE runs, integrate it into the build, figure out the right operational metrics, then deploy as part of some release strategy.
The model is really the smallest part of that process, but occasionally, you can get a huge lift by having someone apply a lot of interesting math.
So it's probably nuclear plant control console and I'm guessing nuclear fuel rods are represented by a dot inside the "sun" and rods themselves are suspended in some sort of a circular enclosure
Technically? If they wanted to be really a pain they could probably hit you with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). That said, that act is like using a nuke to kill a spider, so it'd never actually happen.
1. people on the internet are full of shit
2. Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) takes a 3 hour break from work to, quote: "have dinner and spend time with family". Then has another work/thinking session. Give it a try. That's what I'm trying to do