Hi all, I would be joining FB MPK as MLE in October this year. I want to ask about work life balance for ML engineers and the learning opportunities on day to day basis. The questions are: 1. How much do you learn outside of what you already knew before joining FB? 2. How much research papers you read and implement? What percentage of that helps you move the needle here? #tech #facebook Current TC : 320k USD Facebook TC : 360K USD
What's MPK?
Menlo Park office.
What’s your FB offer
Updated.
This must be an E5 offer correct?
You’ll be mindlessly running pipelines and doing feature engineering- pure product work is better afaik
You mean pure software engineering?
Yes
Not much reading papers, we don't do that here at fb for the large part. You won't learn ML per se. You mostly will be involved in pipeline work and running some models from UI. Overall people don't come to fb for the learning, they come for the money
That is a really interesting view point. I see lot of very good credentials people working as MLE in FB, they all wouldn't be retraining models I think.
You will be surprised about what they do here at fb
Also have an MLE offer and am curious about a similar question. Have you seen people moving from "traditional" product teams to more research-heavy orgs within Facebook (FAIR is, obviously, a stretch but an ultimate goal)?
I'm sure people would have that option but it also comes at the cost of impact vs research. Easier to justify role and promotion with high impact orgs at the cost of not so interesting work IMHO.
Is that an E5 offer?
Yes E5
This is great offer. Can you share your yoe?
8 YOE
Why are you leaving grab ? Isn't it about to ipo ? Why not ride to enjoy big dollars ?
There is lock up period on liquidating and no guarantee the stock will go beyond the roof. It all sounds a bit risky. Also for MLE its better to be in company which already has the infra to support large scale ML.
Interesting. Why do you think grab might not go moon like other IPOs? It's comparable to uber but at a much smaller valuation, so a lot more potential? Btw, feel free to DM if you like. I am an MLE at two different teams at FB already. The experiences in both are quite different.
Forget ads. Your best bet is AI org. Otherwise you will get 0 time learning. You are paid to execute
Any idea what kind of ML work is done in London teams?
@jffysgh, wouldn’t working at Ads org come with the advantage of better WLB and better stability? Also could you please explain a bit more about AI org and what they do, I have same offer and curious if it would be a better match for me Thanks a lot
It depends on your team. There’s a spectrum between research and product. The closer to the product, the less you’d learn about pure ML knowledge (it’d also depend on how mature the product is. Less mature product usually comes with low-hanging ML work but more product exploration)
Thank you. I'm a generalist MLE but I like to sharpen my skills by reading. Today I get zero time doing that. So though I have gained product experience I have not learned anything new theoretically because of the pace at which we move. I'm hoping to change this in FB while still having impact.
Make sense. You can talk to some ML research team or super established product ML teams (e.g. Ads)