Best way to become SWE in FAANG research team
I just recently started working and my ultimate career goal is to be a SWE in a cutting edge research team in FAANG. I’m talking about the SWEs who get coauthored in research papers that come out of FAANG. The area I’m interested in is systems and networking, not AI/ML which may require a different path. How should I spend the majority of my free time to achieve this goal? YOE: < 1 year TC: 150k #engineering #software #research #faang
So far I am surprised by the amount of people voting PhD considering how many threads on Blind talk about ppl regretting their PhD
i think thats cause many phds just end up doing some job u could do with a BS. However, if you actually want to do research, it seems phd is the way to go.
Do you think they end up with a regular SWE job because they weren’t competent enough to get a research position or because they chose for a regular SWE?
There is not much place for innovation in systems or networking, I'm not sure if that's a good domain for pursuing researcher career.
What makes you say that? I see plenty of really cool and innovative papers come out of top systems and networking conferences like SIGCOMM, OSDI, NSDI, etc every year. Are you more of an AI/ML guy? Also there is more hardware related stuff like 5G, programmable switches, RISC-V, custom ASICS, FPGAs, smart NICs, etc. However, hardware is a completely different beast
I have been doing systems engineering for a while. Core parts of most of the systems are already built in big tech, and engineers are just continuously improving existing once. And when we can't do much improvement quickly,, we just add new capacity ;)