Offer evaluation
Hey everyone, I am choosing between two offers, and I'm having trouble deciding which one to accept. For Cruise, the role is fully remote (the entire team is remote and mostly scattered around the US) and I can stay in Seattle (so no state income tax). The role is somewhat detached from production and involves more experimental/academic work. The equity grant is structured as an Long Term Cash incentive, so paid fully in cash (not stock). However, the future of the company is a bit uncertain and I don't know about morale. The LLM startup is close to $1B in valuation, and is doing really cool work on training their own large language models. The technical team has great background and I could learn a lot. My work would involve working on various parts in the stack, including pre training. However, the role is hybrid and I have to move to San Francisco. The equity has a lot of upside but is technically paper money. I would love to work on training large language models and serving them, but on the other hand I'm not sure if it's worthwhile giving up on (much) better cash comp and remote. Any thoughts? YoE: 5 TC: 250
Is that cruise equity GM stock?
No, pure cash
Then why is it not part of base?
Hey OP. Congrats and what’s your background to reach those offers? Like how can someone who wants to be MLE successfully connect with those companies and nail the interview? Do you have phd?
I just applied there "manually" without referral. My background is in AI/ML and have a bunch of published papers.
P.S.: If you haven't had much MLE exposure, I think the best thing to do these days is to get your hands dirty with some side projects and fine tune some open source LLMs on some custom datasets with LoRA or something along those lines.
do not join Cruise. It's LLM world. And do you not watch the news..?
It’s a shitshow here based on leadership, but the new comp is all cash, and cruise still pays good. If you’re just here for money, come here by all means. If you’re looking for good work and healthy growth, maybe look elsewhere.
@cruiser do you have experience working remotely at cruise? How is the support culture/work/growth?
Morale is low at the company, and there’s a lot of uncertainty. Some teams (and the one you’d be joining if I’m not mistaken) still do interesting work. Lots of employees are remote, and pay is good. Feel free to DM.
I’ve worked in FAANG, startups, and other AV companies. Cruise is by far the worst company I’ve ever worked for. The leadership team has been working on a new roadmap to get cruise back on the road for 5 months and so far have nothing to show for it. It is only a matter of time before cruise is totally folded into GM. The current environment is how I imagine sharks trapped in a shrinking pool feel, stressful and chaotic. I am on my way out the door but I would hate for someone to make the same mistake I did. Good luck
Thanks for the honest opinion.
Just got laid off from cruise and i don’t mean to be negative or try to shy off the offer you received. I would avoid them at all costs, was part of the layoff a week before Christmas. They are pretty sneaky in what they do and the company isn’t going to last for too long. Most of the director/executive leadership either has left or is leaving. GM is pulling back a lot of its investment in the company due to the issues. I’d try the other offer and search for better
I am surprised we are still giving decent offers at this point...
Is it a Chinese LLM startup?
Nevermind, I confused valuation with funding raised, I was like "I don't know of many LLM startups that raised that much that also train their own models..."