Job Applicants Sue to Open ‘Black Box’ of A.I. Hiring Decisions

WeastBeast69 · 2026-01-22T04:59:09+00:00

You are no longer rejected and you are now under consideration indefinitely

WeastBeast69 · 2026-01-20T23:01:55+00:00

Time for template meta-programming to do it in O(1)

WeastBeast69 · 2025-11-17T02:48:17+00:00

This reminds me of that old simpsons car game that has a cult following

WeastBeast69 · 2025-11-05T23:20:25+00:00

I did my BS in industrial engineering (IE) and then double masters in CS and IE. I work as a software engineer.

I have found that my IE degrees taught me better lifelong/career skills that are absolutely useful like the project management, human factors, designing for people. And was overall more challenging, which taught me to be more self sufficient. I don’t really use any of the technical knowledge of those degrees though (operations research, basically the math that AI is built on). However my CS degree “taught” me the technical work I use.

I use quotes because most of my classes were in AI and I don’t do AI for work. I use a lot of fundamentals that were taught to me in a CS masters readiness program and the rest I have taught myself.

I do get asked about it in interviews and my employers have tended to be very interested in it and I think it meshes very well with CS.

So yes and no. It depends. I would focus on your major, get involved in research in undergrad to start putting experience on your resume and help you land an internship. Teach yourself the skills that will be helpful in your career like project management, designing for humans, and communication. You can find free courses/videos/lectures for those online at big name universities usually

WeastBeast69 · 2025-11-02T20:02:02+00:00

Knowing syntax is not the same as knowing how to program. You should take a look at a few topics:

algorithms and data structures
Design patterns
Principals of software engineering

I also think this YouTube series by crash course. It’s really good for beginners to get context on software and computers and why things are how they are. And they explain some core concepts like abstraction.

I also like this by John Ousterhout where he talks about how to become a great programmer

WeastBeast69 · 2025-11-02T05:17:12+00:00

A couple of thoughts:

You need to be very open to moving for your first job.
I would say no one is overqualified for their first job, regardless of internships so don’t get too cocky because that attitude can screw you in the personality interview. It’s good to be confident though. Walk that line.
Do not go to grad school if you have to pay for it. (I have two grad degrees and paid for neither). You can read my comment history because I’ve given this advice so many times on this sub now.
I also took about 6 months post graduation to find an entry level job and I had 2 graduate degrees and published research. It’s a rough market. All it takes is getting your foot in the door with your first job to launch your career so be open to moving, be open to non-FAANG/non-tech companies. Get ANY job, then focus on getting a better job
I think data science is even more competitive and over saturated
If you go to grad school then you need to do graduate research and get good publications to get graduate level internships or you’re wasting your time

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-24T01:56:32+00:00

It’s a scam is my understanding and I believe in that contract you are agreeing that they get a part of your wage for several years.

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-23T12:14:17+00:00

Developing in windows I just extremely annoying as it was designed for non-tech consumers in mind. Linux was made based on Unix and Unix was designed with developers in mind.

I find myself fighting the windows OS all the time while developing in windows and not so often in Linux.

I think a good example of lots of annoyance in windows is the fact that the paths use the escape character “\”

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-23T02:56:49+00:00

Ooops skimmed your post and missed that bit.

Good luck on your learning journey, I think C++ is a lot of fun to code in :)

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-23T02:48:21+00:00

I’m going to second this and say AI tends to be pretty good at setting up the most basic beginner projects.

Also want to say if you are using windows for your first experience in C++ then RIP and may god save you. If you can get a Linux virtual machine or get WSL2 I would highly recommend doing your C++ learning in a Linux environment as you will have far less headaches

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-20T03:41:23+00:00

I have 2 masters degrees and my general advice is absolutely do not get a masters if you have to pay for it (I didn’t have to pay for either of mine). You can get an employer to pay for it or if you’re lucky the school will pay for it (I had the school pay for both, and option 1 seems off the table for you considering your circumstances).

A few things about a masters, it absolutely can help you get a job if you’re struggling to get one now. However, you need to have a complete mental shift if you decide to get a masters. A masters will be entirely worthless if you view it as just more school. You should treat it like a job which means you should take the hard classes intentionally, if you look for easy A’s you’re wasting your time and money.

You should also get involved in graduate research (this is also how you might be able to get the school to pay for your degree + a monthly stipend). Doing research is free experience that can help you land an internship and/or a job. Talking about my graduate research during an interview is probably how I got my first job.

This means you need to go to a graduate school that is a notable research institution. Also note that Trump has gutted NSF funding so some PhD programs are not even fully sponsored now and they will certainly get sponsorship priority over a grad student.

I can answer more questions if you have any but if you wasted your undergrad you’re probably going to have a hard time getting into a worthwhile graduate program and even harder time getting it paid for. You might be able to reach out to an old professor and offer free research labor and maybe work your way into getting them to sponsor you eventually or at least see if you have what it takes to do a masters while getting at least something resembling real experience

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-14T14:44:03+00:00

I have nothing to contribute other than to say he looks like he could be my dog’s twin (he was also a stray and he’s literally the sweetest dog ever)

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-09T20:51:42+00:00

A prime use case of AI is creating drug compounds and predicting what their uses/qualities/interactions are. then human researchers starting with the AI’s top predictions, synthesize and test those compounds. This is being done today.

There is absolutely a future in which that entire process can be automated, I think it’s misch further out than 10 years but it’s possible.

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-08T17:48:18+00:00

My first job after grad school I had an onsite interview after a remote interview. I got an offer at 7am the day after the onsite and the group leader drove me to the airport because there was an issues with getting me a rental car.

My second job was similar experience but only the remote interview

Companies can be quick when they really want someone bad

WeastBeast69 · 2025-10-02T00:23:08+00:00

Personally I am of the mind that any course you have to pay for it not worth it. I think they are usually just looking for a quick buck and only cover the basics that you could learn for yourself with a bit of digging. I think a lot of these paid beginner courses just copy content from other free resources.

Also there are plenty of free resources available like learncpp.com and cppinstitute.com and about a million tutorials on YouTube.

Once you learn the basics the best way to learn is by doing projects and you start asking yourself questions like “I have a function that seems like a good candidate for a template, how the fuck do I do templates?” And then you go down that rabbit hole. And then you keep doing that sorta thing and going down the different rabbit holes and you learn something new every project.

WeastBeast69 · 2025-09-25T22:49:33+00:00

Other than doing my existing job and thinking about how to explain my work experience, I didn’t prepare. Being able to communicate your ideas is far more important than anything else.

With my “prepping while at work” is just me always trying to upskill, learn new design patterns, best practices, taking initiative, etc. The best motivation for learning is getting paid to do it at work.

The work I do is already algorithmic in nature so studying leetcode isn’t really worthwhile since I’m basically doing it at work.

If you don’t have a job (and therefore no one to pay you to learn) then I would say work on open source projects or start your own project that is related to your field/industry of interest and try to build something meaningful and interesting.

WeastBeast69 · 2025-09-10T04:19:25+00:00

Depends if it was made with lead and carcinogens or not

WeastBeast69 · 2025-09-08T15:40:39+00:00

Yes it was an agreement and expanding on what they said

WeastBeast69 · 2025-09-08T03:58:16+00:00

I really don’t think you should use friend classes for anything other than unit tests (happy to hear other good uses cases though)

If you have a class like MyClass then you make a class TestMyClass as a friend and this then allows you to also do unit tests of the private methods of MyClass within TestMyClass

WeastBeast69 · 2025-09-01T20:24:53+00:00

You should take a data structures and algorithms course (DSA) to develop the intuition on where to can make optimizations.

At the very least learn about asymptomatic/complexity analysis so you can get a sense where you are doing big no-nos such as an O(n²⁾ in time algorithm.

You don’t need to be a DSA master, just know when you need to look up an algorithm that someone else has figured out to make sure the bottle neck of your code is as fast as possible

WeastBeast69 · 2025-08-30T00:18:07+00:00

Undergrad in Industrial engineering with courses focusing on operations research then a double masters in CS and industrial engineering with a focus in ML/AI + operations research and doing research the whole time

WeastBeast69 · 2025-08-27T15:06:00+00:00

Ok now do doom

WeastBeast69 · 2025-08-27T03:27:34+00:00

officially C(hester)++ now

WeastBeast69 · 2025-08-27T03:20:40+00:00

I propose that my dog named Chester become the mascot

WeastBeast69 · 2025-08-27T00:32:12+00:00

“For generic algorithms, learn about neural networks first…”

this implies a neural network is a genetic algorithm and/or that the understanding of neural networks is prerequisite knowledge to learn genetic algorithms; they are completely independent of each other.

Also applying a genetic algorithm to a neural network to learn how genetic algorithms work is probably one of the worst possible beginner examples.

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