About me, I am a 33F, and right now working as a Machine Learning Engineer in FAANG. I have been working at this company for 4 years, and worked in ML during my grad school for another 4 years. Through out the 8 years, I never found myself passionately reading papers during my free time. I do read papers during work (or as a part of work) but never felt it like a hobby. Consequently, I performed averagely at work, meet expectations most of time, and sometimes exceed. Recently a couple of things happened, and I really started to contemplate if this field is a correct fit for me. - My team started focusing on LLMs + Vision and I have zero knowledge in that area. I am willing to learn but my team is very success/outcome focused and so have very ambitious roadmaps. I am not able to learn in this tight schedule, and thus not able to build expertise. I feel like a failure because of not catching up (knowledge wise) with everyone else at work. - I was recently diagnosed with infertility, and it is so severe that I might end up not having biological children. I am doing IVF on the side, and so my physical health is not helping me during the cycles. On other days, I am just emotionally drained due to the IVF outcomes, and hence I am not motivated to learn any new things. There is a lot of uncertainty with how IVF is, and I am a person that only considers work as work and nothing more. I hate to give it higher priority, and only dream of becoming a senior manager by the time I retire (if that is in my cards). If I get somewhat lucky with IVF, and become pregnant, I still want to give more importance to my health and well-being. If/When I have a child, I want to give more importance to my child and family. Considering all of this, spending more than 35-40 hours a week for work is not what I want to do in life. But I am good at cracking interviews, and can get relatively good job in the salary range of 400k - 500k TC (I live in Bay Area). Right now, I am in a dilemma that working at my pace may not be what the potential employers want, thus making my life hard after I join them. Are there any teams that set realistic expectations and are a good fit for people like me? Or am I doomed already I want to find a good team that optimizes my personal time, the amount of money I make and gives some amount of growth and success. Looking for your inputs! TC: 440k this year / 340k next year due to 4 year RSU cliff #machinelearning #artificialintelligence
Naaa you’re good 👍🏻
How are you so aure of it? It feels like hell not being able to do my best, and no one to connect with regarding it
Because you’re very self aware and you obviously work with really intelligent people, which skew your perception about your own intelligence. I can tell by your description that you will be fine.
You sound far from mediocre!
I meant mediocre among my peers. I am right now the last one to learn LLMs, and that too I am going slowly. My manager is pushing me so hard to make progress fast, but I am resisting it since I am not motivated and depressed So I am mediocre in this field, and I don’t know a way forward
Does your manager have a llm project for you? Why is he pushing you
Just do what you can. Let chips fall where they may. And it might not be that difficult you think it is. Sounds like a mental block and imposter syndrome.
It could be. But even objectively, I am hardly finding any mediocre MLEs who is not passionate about work, and who wants to be just regular Where am I going to be 5 years down the line? With IVF, (maybe) pregnancy, (maybe) motherhood, or (maybe) childlessness life is going to be hard, and my career would suffer too coz of it. And I might feel like an even bigger failure I just want to know people that are average MLEs and connect with them. Talk shit about how aggressive this field is, how unrealistic some roadmap is, and get back to doing average work
Most of us are mediocre trust me. Some just like to talk more.
Have you considered adopting a baby? There are a lot of young abandoned babies out there would benefit from having a parent like you. They drew the worst hand than most here on Blind. That probably should help you reduce physical stress. Although I get everyone wants their own version of flesh and blood.
I am not too keen on carrying the blood line and stuff. But I am mostly worried about the psychological issues in adopted kids. This is another cause of anxiety for me (I have diagnosed anxiety disorder) I guess that’s a topic for another day
In my experience this is the best time for mediocre MLEs. Most people I know are picking up open source models and running/customizing them for their data. If you are not able to do that then you need to think if you are even mediocre MLE. I do feel bad for your personal situation. It is tough to go through something like that and find motivation to do marginal improvements to profit margins of big tech. But think in terms of whether the work you are doing is worth 400K? Are you actually working 8 hours a day with full concentration on learning the new science concepts? I don’t recommend working more than 40 hours a week. But I do think most people think they are working more than 40 hours a week because they start at 10 and end at 6 but never consider how much time in between they are spending on phone or personal stuff or lunch/chitchat. I think you are obviously an intelligent woman, thats why you are at this position. You can easily learn these LLMs/VLMs stuff, you just need to concentrate and actually work 40 hrs. Trust me I was in the same boat and it’s pretty interesting if you get past all the hype & gimmicks. I would start with the seminal papers and not the 0.01% improvement papers that PhDs are churning out these days. Most of them are useless. Read Deep Work & Slow Productivity by Cal Newport if you need help with making those 40 hrs more productive and actually worth 400k to the company. TC: 550K (Applied Scientist @ Amazon)
Thanks for the detailed reply. Well, I can’t even understand and run open sourced LLM based models, but I can do computer vision models. So I guess I am below mediocre then!! See, another proof of failure!! But in general, I think you need to be in a decently good state of mind to learn new things. Correct me if I am wrong. I am most of the time pissed at my life (recently), and so I take forever to read and understand anything. I was not like this a few months ago I just don’t see a way forward and I have come terms to be a being a mediocre (or below mediocre in your idea) MLE. Now what I don’t know is, is there anyone else like me? Everyone I see around me is passionate, and it feels so isolating
I am not a psychologist but this is sounds like borderline depression. I think it is understandable given personal situation. Maybe try talking to a therapist once? I am not one of those people who recommends going over and above for corporate overlords (I personally don’t even work on Fridays) but I do think we should at least do the job that we are getting paid to do. And if you are unable to do that then sooner or later company will realize it and you won’t even have the opportunity to learn while earning 400K. I know the world seems bleak right now with no hope or positivity but we need to have gratitude for what we do have. Think in terms of what will happen if you loose this job, would you even have money for IVF or fertility treatment. This kind of job opens all kinds of possibilities for us. That is the reason you see passionate people around you it’s because they’re are getting paid ALOT to do something that is actually interesting. I have been through something like that when I lost my father to Covid. I was languishing and doing minimal work with no motivation for almost an year. Trust me “this too shall pass”. I would recommend talking to a therapist and focusing on gratitude & motivation.
I just want you support your IVF path. We did it with my wife, several failures then success. However we did it 10 years ago and not in the US. Technologies advanced a lot! I with you all the best on that path! Regarding your job, I guess you got great replies above!
Thanks! I am not even in a place to ask you about your IVF journey. But good luck with everything:)
Same here. All the best.
if i was diagnosed with infertility, id do some pretty crazy shit if u need someone with super virile sperm lmk (not kidding)
Haha!! Sperm is not the problem. Egg is the problem. Would love to get some free donor eggs if possible though
I would say keep a strategy that whatever new things come up - you learn fast. Try increasing your circle of exposure. Other than that there's a lot of luck. Lots of guys without knowing wth is PCA are running core ML labs in big companies etc. There's no such level set as mediocre. It's just a tag to one person at a particular time stamp, typically lets say after a not so good interview. Doesn't mean much. It's going to be bad if you tag yourself as mediocre. Work is all about finishing the best outcome considering all the constraints.
Wonderful perspective. I am going to remember this and try to follow. But right now, I need to sort some personal stuff right. But thanks for the great comment!! Also, may I ask what you do?
A machine learning engineer :)
These adult problems can certainly be difficult to navigate. 33 is so very young.. so sorry you are going through this. You can do it though, you are strong and have your whole life ahead of you. If no - adoption or surrogacy is another path. As far as learning goes - you have to learn new tech if it is ML or not. SW and many other fields are just like that. I think it's very fortunate actually, it forces you to exercise your brain. Go with your own pace, request accomodations if you feel you cannot keep up due to health. Only consider shifting to something else if you just do not like ml.
Thanks for the kind words! The initial plan is to take some time off. Let’s see how things workout after that.
So you did PhD? What is your current level?
Nope, quit PhD. Senior MLE but I grew slowly. Usually people are hired as mid level in my team, and the good ones (which I think most of my team is) get promoted to senior in 1-2 years
I’m also senior MLE, 34, PhD from top 10 program. I am learning deep learning now. I have no idea what transformers/self-attention mechanisms are beyond the layman terms. We are still young. We can learn these things.