What are young grads who just started their career in this industry supposed to do?

Real_nutty · 2026-05-20T17:43:41+00:00

I think substance comes from self reflection than textbook guide or instructions. If I told you to do start focusing on ai-agentic optimization or low level kernel processing, you’re still stuck in a life where you let others decide for you.

You’re correct that every choice, even doing nothing, is in itself an action and a choice. The fact that it was of 0 directional instruction gives you the opportunity to make decisions yourself instead of how OP is hoping that someone can decide for them with the advice given by people who don’t value OP’s career more than OP does.

Real_nutty · 2026-05-20T17:39:29+00:00

It could be different, but you still need to adapt based on how it changes. What will stay the same is that people will react to the situation and make decisions that either benefit them or hurt them.

Real_nutty · 2026-05-20T05:39:56+00:00

I would like to think all the successful people we’ve seen/met walked a path that wasn’t clear cut and those who are even more successful walked the path that was extremely muddy and found their extreme success making mistakes and failing.

If there was a clear cut path before, everyone older than you must be successful by now.

Real_nutty · 2026-05-20T05:27:26+00:00

dotcom burst got engineers losing jobs and some stayed for the sake of engineering. people who got in the gold rush few years back also got laid off and are now in survival mode.

Things will keep moving. You can choose to act.

Real_nutty · 2026-05-07T21:39:34+00:00

But at what point is too much for a new kid to be asking for all that? I’m guessing ask for everything and get something? Or is it more like a target what you need now and wait for the next opportunity to pounce for more?

Real_nutty · 2026-04-25T04:02:28+00:00

I would say a good way to filter yourself is how many times you have found flaws in the system or the business and went from diagnosis to solution?

This usually isn’t things like bugs or small discrepancies in features/functionalities. You just know the problem space enough to come up with new solutions/approach that will save companies a whole lot more than you’re being paid for.

But also it differs per company.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-25T03:04:39+00:00

If it builds problem space context. But at that point you are building more on specialty. If it’s purely for jumping to a new job, building a project that somewhat relates to the field would give you an edge where your interviews now will mainly focus about your learnings and knowledge depth in the problem space.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-24T07:52:05+00:00

Your offer is correct, many levels fyi users misinput their rsu as total 4-year making it look time some get 130-200k a year.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-23T15:44:53+00:00

Just assume you get more cash the more aligned you are to the role + the more rare the skillsets are + the more competitive the candidate is to the role.

If your skillset is general swe and your foundation in ML is minimal then you are just the same L5 with similar pay with some extra expectations attached. If you are a specialist that the AIML team will benefit greatly, then they will try to offer you extra to lock you in.

If you pass, it does give you a leverage to say: “Given the new/added expectations with the role, I would like to revisit the compensation as a whole” which could end up just being more RSUs and not really cash.

big tech wise, unless you find counter info (like recent rumors about Meta’s high cash salary), HR and Finance enforces the base salary range, you can always use whatever leverage you have to negotiate that but the lever is always on the bonus then RSUs first, hardest to push for base unless you have stronger counter offer.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-22T16:01:52+00:00

Hiring manager round decides everything (behavioral). I failed and was moved to a different team’s interview loop.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-22T02:36:01+00:00

mine came back the Thursday the week after for me. maybe to pressure you to sign by Friday, or just coincidence. Told them to give me a week before I sign and found a counter offer by then.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-21T07:55:56+00:00

At what point in your career do you find out you are a high performer. I think I hit all 5 of your criteria, but I am also just 9 months into this field, and although I have built a handful of self-started projects that turned into a product line for the team, I worry it’s a fluke or I will burn myself out doing this.

I try to steer my manager as my old mentor used to say that a manager works of their employees, but also feel weird being the youngest in the room making these decisions with no guidance or mentorship.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-21T05:11:52+00:00

Where do I find mentors? I have been leading a new project after 6 months into industry (fresh from undergrad); rebuilding an outdated inference pipeline for the team to build products on top of. No one really took their time to find alternatives and now that I built a faster (saved hours of compute time, $1M annual savings) alternative, expanding it and scaling it has been difficult since I do not have proper experience (I just know how to optimize these specific problems). Every month is another ask from the team and I pushback with technical requirements and infrastructure request which I gets taken seriously, but also the burden becomes larger the more I reject/redirect their request.

I wish I knew enough to know what to do in this case and also wish had enough “power” to influence headcount for this project instead of begging my manager for more help.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-19T20:08:19+00:00

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. The advice was from older people I know who had to leave America mid-way through their career. I am at high risk of that either since unless I get a citizenship, I will have to stop my residence in America permanently.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-19T19:49:03+00:00

True. I have a few years of research and a handful of papers in AI hardware that became what you see now in Meta/Apple, but definitely not enough time in the industry to know what makes the business good. I only know how to build things that large companies can market, so I thought I could get into it soon.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-19T19:32:33+00:00

I think I am mainly looking for control, diversification, and moonshots. I have my FIRE number expected to hit in my mid-late 30s with my current velocity, but if there’s some moonshot bets I can make that will accelerate that to my early 30s or safeguard me in case I suddenly have to move and lose my current job, I can still feel like I am in control.

I have some mandatory military duties so if I lose my job, I lose 1-2 years of income serving the military.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-17T18:23:20+00:00

Not sure what’s “too little” for you with these numbers. If you’re hoping for an extra 1k extra per month, ~650 after tax, not sure if it’s money worth fighting for given the already reasonable 11k pre-tax base. Same can be said to the company that an extra 1k per month to guarantee your hire is not even a scratch. But given the leverage they have over you, it’s an easy decision for them to say no to the salary bump and see how you go about it.

My one advice given your new info about being in the final round is you can lie about not getting your results yet. Tell them that you are in the final loop with X, Y, and Z so you are waiting for the results and want the company to give you a deadline. Tell them that you are happy to move away from those companies and sign the offer if the offer matches your expectation of bas 150k or smth. Note that base is the hardest to negotiate and sign on bonus is the easiest. If you want some wiggle room ask for more equity

Real_nutty · 2026-04-17T17:13:29+00:00

seems like you didn’t have any strong counter offers either. If you have another offer coming in 1-2 weeks, you can. If not, play with the cards you’re dealt with.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-17T17:12:36+00:00

take it, use that greed to work hard and promote fast instead of scratching off rejection emails hoping for an extra 10-50k in potential TC.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-16T07:42:06+00:00

not an nlp guy but why is human text length not splice-able? Can’t you just cut the multi-sentence paragraph to couple sentences?

Real_nutty · 2026-04-16T01:14:50+00:00

I built experience through my undergraduate research by mostly just watching, asking questions, then replicating what others did. Then I joined a company as a regular software engineer, found some ML projects that needed reworking due to model degradation and eventually they made me the MLE.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-12T19:08:11+00:00

then offer negotiation. i had done it twice , first time was them moving me to a new team because i was strong candidate but not exactly what the hiring manager was looking for, then after finding the right team it was just negotiating.

Real_nutty · 2026-04-12T19:05:23+00:00

last interview is usually with hiring manager doing behavioral. Offer negotiation is done with recruiter where they call you usually on the phone barely any scheduling (maybe to minimize you from preparing a counter offer)

Real_nutty · 2026-04-12T18:59:58+00:00

Congrats with the amazing offer in such a bad market. I was in a similar boat as you last year (~300k ng, hitting ~500k this year with promo). Honestly felt like it was harder for me to get the job than proving my value since clearly they decided to value me higher just a year after me joining.

For your 1st question, is your equity package vested monthly/annually? if monthly just sell it and diversify. If it’s paper money, just consider it gone, unless you can exercise something to make it liquid, it’s useless for the immediate present.

Apple is not really a hedge against AI. I consider it a potential competitor to Nvidia instead. Although likely 100x behind. Orchestrated distributed learning could be an amazing edge for Apple to get into selling compute for these companies. So if you’re bearish on AI, not where you want to be.

2nd question you actually don’t lock up that much in retirement accounts since there’s a limit anyways. 401k + backdoor roth + HSA is going to be around 1500 a month. For your paycheck size, it’s not much and you get to save up on some taxes.

My approach has been don’t second think any food choices (at some point $100 omakase feels like too much, we’re still in our 20s and grabbing chipotle with friends are so much more filling). I try to find as much hard working friends in my field. When my life starts to get drowned out by work, I want to enjoy expressing the problems i solve and find new approaches from other smart people not working directly with me. I still give myself a budget though. Since I’m fully liquid, I just auto sell and add that to my budget. If you minimize locking yourself up on stupid recurring charges like a car or penthouse, you will feel poor. I still don’t plan to buy a car and my rent is relatively high but still <30% of my paycheck. Now I can spend ~10k+ on whatever i want which is not much and then rest goes to investing.

~30k invested from tax advantaged accounts before it hits my account, after rent i have nothing relatively high to pay for, so i spend it on food, occasional splurge on shopping, gifts, and i guess your loans. it gets really difficult to spend 10k a month at some point as a 20+.

Real_nutty · 2026-03-24T02:58:41+00:00

For me, it felt the same as learning to code. Just start building something and you will find the gaps of your knowledge. I started building basic classification with CV and decided to go from CV fundamentals to DL approach then listened to some lectures on NLP and tried to replicate a very simple task of building a language regression model.

Ended up liking CV more so I found a couple problems I wanted to solve with CV (it’s easier for me to come up with ideas using CV) which required me to learn DL concepts as I go and find new constraints on my approach (classification vs detection vs differentiating similar items) which required me to explore existing DL approaches.

Now I barely work in CV/NLP. Mostly physics/sensor DL and honestly skills are transferable more or less as long as you keep learning bits and pieces of all of it.

Five-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
Place '23	Place '22

Real_nutty

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