u/michaelnovati replied ·
I'm someone who has been in the industry for 15+ years now, 8 years at Facebook (from 200 engineers to 10K), 4 years helping people level up their jobs into dozens of top companies, and various internships before.
Some observations I've made:
1. People tend to be unsuccessful who just always jump on the latest thing because most companies, even the top tier ones, have extremely robust and well established businesses and systems based on new-ish technology but they don't always just drop everything and convert everything to you saying the latest stuff. Some employees work on the latest stuff and they're typically world experts or the most experienced people and the vast majority of people are working on the core stuff. So If you're trying to get into the industry, I recommend being really good at the core stuff instead of always jumping to the latest thing. hoping that you find it in. For example, a number of people jumped into block chain engineering without any kind of programming experience and I think some people found jobs here and there, but it was not a consistent way of finding a job and it wasn't an easier pathway than general engineering. Another example is I've interviewed a number of grads from a specific bootcamp that works on open source projects often for tools for up and coming libraries and frameworks and one of the questions I asked any of the people is you know why? did you go all in on this brand new framework that hasn't been vetted yet and the people don't have good answers to that. Because at a real company like Facebook they wouldn't just change their entire code base to use Deno overnight 3 months after it comes out it would take years and years and years and the reasons for not doing it are not necessarily purely about the technology itself but the engineering team costs in this kind of conversion.
2. Real engineers are problem solvers. This is why AI won't eliminate your job because we will have infinite problems to solve in the future. Climate tech is something almost never talked about here compared to AI and it's one of the most humanity-level problems we have to solve that's going to take more resources than we have right now. What a job as an engineer in climate tech looks like might be a little bit different than it is right now, but if you're a problem solver you'll find problems to solve there. But If you're starting out, you don't want to be an expert in climate change necessarily. you just want to build your problem solving tools and find a place where you can apply them to get started, rather than targeting the industry first.
3. The best engineers I know are always reading about the latest things and super on top of things. Dinner time conversations are all about self-driving cars, AI, ethics in tech, inequality, people are very well studied on these things but they aren't the bread and butter for why these people have jobs day to day.