How much do generalist engineers need to know about AI?
You are reading Compiler, a software engineering newsletter by Triplebyte editor Daniel Bean that delivers regular reportings and rantings on the industry's top news, trends and interesting players.
Happy holiday weekend! There was a lot of AI news this past week. But of course, what recent week hasn’t been full of AI news?
That’s because, even if you don’t believe this idea that all tech companies will soon become “AI companies,” there’s no doubt that machine learning and artificial intelligence are growing more and more integral across almost every part of software. That growth is triggering a spike in demand for devs with a grasp in AI and ML tools, and experts I spoke to are even expecting companies to start filling roles like web, front-end, and back-end with engineers who have some familiarity with AI elements. This will be especially true for recruiting for “cutting edge projects” in the future, one told me.
To wit, some AI skills I was told generalist engineers should look into learning:
It rarely makes sense for a developer to try to build anything in ML completely from scratch, especially someone new to ML, Aditya Rohilla told me. He said it’s smart for generalist engineers to begin tinkering with ML-based features in their applications by importing libraries through platforms like AWS and Google Firebase.
Everyone already knows that Python is the king language in ML and AI. But learning general ML Python libraries like scikit-learn is the best starting point for specifically getting into tweaking ML code, University of San Francisco data science professor Brian Spiering said.
Sponging up what you can about statistics in ML and AI can turn into making yourself useful in model debugging, a job that can be even more valued than building in ML and AI work, said Facebook AI software engineering manager Jason Guaci.
To check out more on this, read my entire article The AI Skills Generalist Engineers Should Consider Learning at Triplebyte.
Thinking of Leaving Your Tech Hub City and Going Permanently Remote? It Could Mean a Pay Cut.
After recently announcing that Facebook employees were free to work remotely for the remainder of 2020, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that the social network giant is looking into making a lot of its positions permanently remote – as many as 50% by 2030. Oh, and he also mentioned that if workers want to take their remote positions and leave the high-priced Silicon Valley area, a pay cut will likely be in the cards.
“We’ll adjust salary to your location at that point,” said Zuckerberg during a livestream on Thursday.
If a recent survey on anonymous tech industry gossip forum Blind is any gauge, Facebook could have an opportunity to make a lot of cuts. Two-thirds of the Bay Area workers counted in the survey said they would consider taking their remote tech jobs to less-expensive cities.
Remote work in tech is nothing new and neither is the idea of adjusted pay for workers in lower “cost of living” cities. But with Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Coinbase pivoting to more permanent remote workers after COVID, expect this debate to pick up steam in the coming months.
For now, to get an idea of how software engineers earn differently in different cities around the world, check out Hired’s State of Salary Report from 2019.
Quick Hits
Here are the biggest announcements from this week’s (remote) Microsoft Build conference. ZDNet
Nvidia’s AI recreated Pac-Man from scratch just by watching it being played. The Verge
How do open source devs sustain themselves? Hacker News
A leaker claims to have seen “Apple Glass” AR glasses and detailed how they’ll work. Ars Technica
Here’s a new website listing all the tech companies that are going big into remote work after COVID. Officestatus.fyi
A developer dishes on what he learned in his six months at an AI company. Dev.to
From Triplebyte
Confused by algorithms? You could probably use an intro to “Math Speak.” A new blog at Triplebyte explains a few concepts behind some of the basic math language intertwined in computer science and algorithms. Read it here.
Was your engineering internship for this summer canceled? Join Triplebyte on Thursday, May 28th at 5pm PST as we interview Thomas (Tido) Carriero, Chief Product Development Officer at Segment and expert on all things 'intern', to learn how you can build your engineering skills and resume this summer, with or without a paid internship. Register for the live Zoom webinar here.
Some companies hiring engineers on Triplebyte right now:
Check out Triplebyte’s Actively Hiring page to find more companies that are looking for software engineering talent right now!
Tech Updates
Microsoft has released Windows Terminal 1.0: Part of this week’s Build news worth mentioning here is the full release of Windows Terminal, a previously announced one-stop tool for command-line and shell work in Windows 10. Microsoft is also now promising monthly updates to it.
GitLab 13.0 was released: This new version includes the previously announced Gitaly Clusters failure recovery tool to reduce outages. There are also security improvements, including third-party security integration for Kubernetes.
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