The AI future right now: I took a self driving taxi home tonight in San Francisco, like many other nights, and passed by 22 other self driving cars. What this means for YOU is extremely complicated.

The AI future right now: I took a self driving taxi home tonight in San Francisco, like many other nights, and passed by 22 other self driving cars. What this means for YOU is extremely complicated. This post isn't about bootcamps but rather it's about why technology is so exciting. I can't say a bootcamps are the answer but if you are passionate about technology, I hope this motivates you to keep trying to figure it out. Ask me questions and share your thoughts! --------------- I'm lucky that I can zoom around San Francisco in Waymo self driving cars. They sure make the newspaper headlines, but the day-to-day ride is a lot more nuanced than any article or headline would make you believe. It's not a secret how the underlying machine learning works: - Add dozens of sensors to a car - Have humans drive for millions of miles in the cars, record data on those sensors, and send that data to common machine learning algorithms to learn how to steer and accelerate the car based on that data - Test the models with human drivers ready to take the wheel and make adjustments until the algorithm is perfect, whenever a human intervenes. This is the "easy" part because it's just a matter of money. Can you afford to make the cars and can you afford to have humans drive millions and millions of miles to train the algorithms. And can you do this without making a single penny of revenue. (... and can you hire the best ML engineers to do all this the most economically efficiently) Waymo (Google) can. Zoox (Amazon) can. Cruise (GM) can! --------------- Self driving cars intimidate me. I've been an engineer for a long time, I was the #1 code contributer at Meta and one of the fastest people to be promoted from intern to the principal level engineer ever at the company. If I had to make a self driving car from scratch, it would take me a long time to figure out what to do. -------------- The reason why AI is so exciting and will create so many jobs, is because all of the above create so may opportunities for full stack generalist engineers who have no idea how the underlying machine learning works. For Waymo alone: 1. Build the iOS and Android apps 2. Build the payment systems 3. Build the fraud systems 4. Build the in-car meta experience (sound, lighting, copy, colors, displays) 5. Build the in-car navigation experience 6. Build the in-car control (air conditioning, displays) 7. Build the fault detection systems (seatbelts, malfunctions, internal sensors, people touching the steering wheel) 8. Build the emergency handling situations (accidents, police, etc...) 9. Build the customer support within the car (if a passenger needs help) 10. Build the customer support outside the car (billing issues) 11. Build the feedback processing system during before and after (collecting user feedback and sending to the right people) 12. Data warehousing of all meta data collected in rides 13. Car diagnostics and status (tire pressure, battery levels, when the car needs maintenance) 14. Regulatory compliance (data and interfaces to work with governments on self driving cars) 15. Insurance compliance (data to insurance companies to help figure out how to insure self driving cars) 16. Ride scheduling infra (booking cars, assigning cars, routing, etc...) 17. Car updates and releases (how do you update the software in a car over the air and when) 18. Security (making sure all aspects are secure) 19. Emergency response (tools and features for first responders to interact with the car) I'm sure DOZENS MORE. -------------- Doing a 12 week bootcamp does NOT make you qualified to manage something like this or lead anything like this. It takes years of experience and failure and success and failure and success and failure.... But all of this stuff is going to create so many jobs we can't even imagine. My advice: If this is exciting to you, get a job as soon as possible and sponge up as much as you can. How do you get a job as fast as you can? This is the hard question. Bootcamps aren't working right now. "Get rich quick - 3 weeks of AI/ML" are not they answer either, they are absolute scams. I don't have answers for you, other than for most of you, you won't be able to quickly get into this industry. It's going to take a long time. If you build every day, and don't give up, you'll get there. If anyone promises you a timeframe, double check that.... DMs are open, comments are open, what do you think?

I've ridden about 100 miles total and it costs about the same as an Uber or Lyft. I also make notes about all of the things we need non-ML engineers to do every time I ride haha, and I thought the list was so interesting that I wanted to make this post.

I got feedback that the sub was too doom and gloom and I was trying to post something more optimistic. You have a lot of experience, so what do you think of the argument?

Thanks, that was the point

Police officers in major cities too!

I have the perspective of: 1. being a silicon valley outsider who broke in 2. working at Meta from 200 engineers to 10000 and learned a ton about how the sausage is made 3. I started a mentorship program to help engineers prepare for interviews and many people went to bootcamps in the past so I know about them and their pros and cons for your career down the road. The story of why I'm here. It all started when a bunch of people applied to my program claiming to have about 6 months to a year of work experience. When I interviewed them their stories all fell apart quickly and I realized these are all Codesmith graduates and the work experience was actually 3 week long group projects and when I confronted someone they said that they were coached into how to talk about it like it was months of work experience. I did a deep dive and found a Reddit post from 2019 from a tech hiring manager who had the exact same experience. Then in May 2022 I worked with Reddit to do an official site wide AMA and I got barraged with questions about Meta being evil and got a lot of feedback that I handled them very well. So I decided to start engaging about bootcamps to try to give a holistic picture of the good and bad, the pros and cons. Too many people woo'd by marketing promising to make them senior engineers in 12 weeks without understanding how it works, why it works, and what the consequences are later on. Ultimately my goal is to help people find the best path for them in this industry, whether it's a bootcamp or not.

I'm not familiar with them but I hope there are a lot of successful self-driving car companies competing with each other.

It takes time yeah, but learning fundamentals, like CS50 stuff (Stanford and MIT also have these courses) AND also spending hours and hours building things and learning the practical. Getting stuck and persisting until you figure it out. Over your career your toolbelt will accumulate more tools, and you need a couple to get hired for your first gig.

If you can get a degree from a top 10 school, then go for it. It's not a guarantee, but you have a 10X better shot than anyone else at breaking into the industry. Caveat: do big tech internships each and every summer. Otherwise, I think it's better than a bootcamp for the odds of getting a job, but your path will probably be unique and you should consider all options, with the expectation that it might take a couple of tries and several years to finally break in and stay in.