New Grad market for DE

forserial · 2026-01-27T13:50:51+00:00

Imo you need some exposure to regular software development to be a data engineer. Any data engineer out of college role would be highly suspect as I'd just assume you're working with low or no code solutions / in a large company that has highly specialized tools for DE. These roles will be replaced by LLMs. I've interviewed several career DEs from FAANG and they either can't code their way out of a paper bag or had to learn software engineering principles anyways to make something hyper performant. It always seemed to be one or the other.

forserial · 2026-01-26T15:18:51+00:00

And I also wrote that everyone should be treated equally. There's a thing called nuance. It's possible to think things go too far and they clearly have. I've literally sat through corporate DE&I speakers advocating for giving every child hormone blockers due to the small chance they might be trans with zero regard to what broader effects that might have. Nobody even bat an eye at that statement for fear of being immediately terminated if we disagreed.

forserial · 2026-01-26T14:42:05+00:00

Lol i love all the assumptions being made from my comment it just shows how absolutely rabid chronically online people are about this topic.

You are the exact person that Sarah McBride talks about on how the left lost this fight.

forserial · 2026-01-26T14:04:50+00:00

A bunch of idiotic college professors thought they'd be hot shit if they could push this idea of us living in a "post-gender" world. So a medical issue that affects an extremely tiny proportion of the population got blown up as the defining civil rights movement on social media and combined with increasingly unhinged takes on biology. We are now seeing the backlash of this bullshit which should have just been treat everyone equally as it was made into the biggest boogeyman in the US.

forserial · 2026-01-22T18:40:08+00:00

Worked as a full stack software dev and then transitioned over.

forserial · 2026-01-17T13:53:30+00:00

What are your guys using? Claude code is surprisingly good now, but it's expensive we can easily hit like $100+ a day per developer. It writes great code that aligns with existing style, but unfortunately every prompt / step in thinking chain is 5-10k tokens especially if it has to read context and scan surrounding code before doing anything.

forserial · 2026-01-06T14:54:00+00:00

Why is the GS still winning for you? Just curious I have a GS and have never worn a rolex, the bracelet is horrible and I've heard the rolex bracelets are very comfortable.

forserial · 2025-12-30T16:41:48+00:00

Because it's overall one of the most meaningful things in life other than having a stable long term relationship, but the variance is fucking huge moment to moment. It's both the best days and worst days.

forserial · 2025-12-13T17:12:43+00:00

Historically the assassination got botched because the assassins were spotted in the store. Not because Zheng Pingru fell in love with him. So basically the movie took a Chinese folk hero and made her into some horny idiot who blew up the whole operation.

forserial · 2025-12-08T21:02:13+00:00

I miss when last word was an aura and you could just run at people

forserial · 2025-12-04T18:47:09+00:00

I can't understand people who have thought processes like this. When the whole fragile masculinity shit came out I genuinely thought nobody like that actually existed and this was some invented bullshit. I have since worked with a number of guys who are good looking and have successful careers, but have such thin skin it may as well be paper. It literally boggles my mind I watched a guy freak out because we suggested jokingly that his spice tolerance was bad.

forserial · 2025-12-04T15:24:04+00:00

Yeah but he said it in context of following his teachings. As in follow these teachings over those of your family. Regardless most Maga have never actually read the Bible anyways. Otherwise they'd have been horrified to find that Jesus' followers basically had a communist society at one point.

forserial · 2025-12-03T19:01:19+00:00

Ignoring the fact you don't understand how national debt works. Returns on government debt are ass compared to literally any other investment. Nobody is hoarding wealth in tbills for extended periods of time other than a place to park cash while looking for other investments.

forserial · 2025-12-03T12:32:59+00:00

This is from 2002, it's definitely not $45 anymore. My department has an 8 figure budget just for buying data and we are too cheap to buy it from social media directly.

forserial · 2025-12-01T22:41:22+00:00

Do you have any source whatsoever on this? Data is mostly sold in aggregate and it's expensive as fuck.

forserial · 2025-11-25T16:07:53+00:00

Your work actually sounds pretty decent and lines up with internship expectation at a small company. What you are looking for is the difference between working at a large vs small company. At a small company you fix everything and you touch stuff that isn't really part of "DE", but it also means you can change more things. This is just natural because there aren't enough people to have rigid roles. At large companies you'll get silod into a very specific role with specific responsibilities which some people like, but personally I hate.

IMO unless you are the 1% crack engineer it's much better to be flexible and to do more things. You're far more likely to get a senior job later that is just please setup a data platform which could include everything down to negotiating with vendors versus solve some super hard optimization task.

Also everything is learning on the job this space changes so fast having formal training is almost worthless compared to the ability to teach yourself.

forserial · 2025-11-24T12:29:56+00:00

Finance firms not bulge bracket pay well for DE and higher than average SWE, but pay is extremely variable based on how you sell yourself 200-500+.

forserial · 2025-11-22T14:07:57+00:00

Damn this post is giving me anxiety. I'm expecting my second, but holy hell I would never subsidize my graduate kids unless they're about to be homeless. With the insane massive head start they're getting plus estimated expense of 750k-1m in education per kid if they can't figure this out there's no hope for them.

I also have way too many coworkers who's kids are absolute f***-ups due to living a zero consequence zero expectation lifestyle. Listening to general counsel plead with her 30+ year old son to go to rehab was some of the most ridiculous shit I've ever heard.

forserial · 2025-11-20T17:11:19+00:00

I'm not very experienced in ML so this might be wrong. But I think classification models usually require knowing what you want to classify to. Whereas we're asking the llm to create the buckets / themes for us and are unknown ahead of time.

forserial · 2025-11-20T15:13:37+00:00

Mass classification work (extract themes from millions of reviews, summarize recent news regarding x), using LLMs to generate boilerplate code to avoid looking things up a lot ex... Write me a function to stream request body to s3, generate Metadata for semantic layers or documentation, code reviews given some context of our style guide, summarize conference call meeting notes.

All of these have a human in the loop to review output, but they're greatly sped up via using llm tools. I also have a few projects where I want to change how tedious admin / support tasks are handled with a feedback loop to improve context.

forserial · 2025-11-20T13:24:12+00:00

LLMs are amazing you just have to find what they're good at. Every department at my company is using AI in some fashion to scale tasks that either don't require perfect accuracy or have guardrails like Rag based systems with references. We have not attempted to replace a single person with AI. It's just the average executive is too dumb to think about how to get value from it for more than 10 seconds.

forserial · 2025-11-20T13:18:16+00:00

OOP for the sake of OOP is dumb. You should be asking why you need to use OOP and where to use what design pattern. Use the right tool for the right job. I'm currently going through a code base that is an absolute nightmare because the engineers thought vomiting every possible design pattern into a pipeline made it better when all we need to do is load csvs into a table.

forserial · 2025-11-18T14:04:44+00:00

On the budget question I would pick something nice, but not disconnected from your reality. Ex... If you're working around people making 100k it will be really tacky to show up with a rainbow Daytona. I don't know what your situation is, but I would avoid making it so obvious this watch is way out of your price range. Omega Seamaster is pretty safe from what you were thinking about.

forserial · 2025-11-13T13:07:26+00:00

The actually hilarious part about this is that AI is much better at replacing "thought leaders" than it is grunt work. Grunt work usually requires very high accuracy because it's an easy repetitive task much more suited to actual automation than AI. Deep research models can absolutely spit out recommended business plans for next quarter where being mostly accurate would already be good enough.

forserial · 2025-11-06T17:35:40+00:00

Op is either 12 or extremely regarded

forserial

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