I’m curious to know how people regard these careers. I used to go to a top grad school to do AI, but dropped out within a few months in favor of a more chill SDE career because I realised the Research Scientist path is considerably harder and that I’m unlikely to be the next Karpathy. The allure of a tech salary was also too hard to resist, being poor and all. Is a Research Scientist position at DeepMind for example not infinitely more stressful than being an SDE in FAANG? Is it worth it in your eyes? I’m seeing a bunch of former classmates starting their careers at DeepMind in their late 20s as scientists, and I’m wondering if I made the right choice dropping out. TC: 230k nw: 1m
It’s worth it, as you have a chance to work on hard poorly defined problems daily (if it’s your thing). Money-wise, the SDE path is more lucrative, but it’s not all about the money.
From looking it up online, I read research scientists start with 500k Tc
You also in a way lose the money you could’ve made in your early 20s and invested it. Perhaps you’d get really close or even higher than 500k given the same age as the scientist
I believe research Engineer, research scientist, applied research Engineer and applied research scientist have better money than SDE. my aim is to move to any of these roles someday but seems really hard without Masters/Phd
Hindsight is 20-20. Always move forward. You chose your path, had your learnings, now live THIS life not not the what ifs…
DeepMind is super specific, can’t compare to SDE at FAANG with 100,000+ software engineers