Speaking as a junior, I’m happy to do this on my own (and do!).
Conversations like this are always well intentioned and friction truly is super useful to learning. But the ‘…’ in these conversations seems to always be implicating that we should inject friction.
There’s no need. I have peers who aren’t interested in learning at all. Adding friction to their process doesn’t force them to learn. Meanwhile adding friction to the process of my buddies who are avidly researching just sucks.
If your junior isn’t learning it likely has more to do with them just not being interested (which, hey, I get it) than some flaw in your process.
Start asking prospective hires what their favorite books are. It’s the easiest way to find folks who care.
I’ll also make the observation that the extra time spent is very valuable if your objective solely is learning, but often the Business™ needs require something working ASAP
It's not that friction is always good for learning either though. If you ever prepared course materials, you know that it's important to reduce friction in the irrelevant parts, so that students don't get distracted and demotivated and time and energy is spent on what they need to learn.
So in principle Gen AI could accelerate learning with deliberate use, but it's hard for the instructor to guide that, especially for less motivated students
I admire your attitude and the clarity of your thought.
It’s not as if today’s juniors won’t have their own hairy situations to struggle through, and I bet those struggles will be where they learn too. The problem space will present struggles enough: where’s the virtue in imposing them artificially?
Im a student right now and have a background in a non-CS field so struggle with the impostor-syndrome/fundamentals double whammy. The advice I’ve found most valuable is to basically cosplay as someone who’s a complete pro. What would that person read for news? How do they practice their craft? What books do they read on their free time?
Cosplay that role long enough and you become it. I’m still learning but it has been a great signpost for me over the last couple years.
> Our findings reveal that students perceived AI tools as helpful for grasping code concepts and boosting their confidence during the initial development phase. However, a noticeable difficulty emerged when students were asked to work un-aided, pointing to potential over reliance and gaps in foundational knowledge transfer.
As someone studying CS/ML this is dead on but I don't think the side-effects of this are discussed enough. Frankly, cheating has never been more incentivized and it's breaking the higher education system (at least that's my experience, things might be different at the top tier schools).
Just about every STEM class I've taken has had some kind of curve. Sometimes individual assignments are curved, sometimes the final grade, sometimes the curve isn't a curve but some sort of extra credit. Ideally it should be feasible to score 100% in a class but I think this actually takes a shocking amount of resources. In reality, professors have research or jobs to attend to and same with the students. Ideally there are sections and office hours and the professor is deeply conscious of giving out assignments that faithfully represent what students might be tested on. But often this isn't the case. The school can only afford two hours of TA time a week, the professors have obligations to research and work, the students have the same. And so historically the curve has been there to make up for the discrepancy between ideals and reality. It's there to make sure that great students get the grades that they deserve.
LLMs have turned the curve on its head.
When cheating was hard the curve was largely successful. The great students got great grades, the good students got good grades, those that were struggling usually managed a C+/B-, and those that were checked out or not putting in the time failed. The folks who cheated tended to be the struggling students but, because cheating wasn't that effective, maybe they went from a failing grade to just passing the class. A classic example is sneaking identities into a calculus test. Sure it helps if you don't know the identities but not knowing the identities is a great sign that you didn't practice enough. Without that practice they still tend to do poorly on the test.
But now cheating is easy and, I think it should change the way we look at grades. This semester, not one of my classes is curved because there is always someone who gets a 100%. Coincidentally, that person is never who you would expect. The students who attend every class, ask questions, go to office hours, and do their assignments without LLMs tend to score in B+/A- range on tests and quizzes. The folks who set the curve on those assignments tend to only show up for tests and quizzes and then sit in the far back corners when they do. Just about every test I take now, there's a mad competition for those back desks. Some classes people just dispense with the desk and take a chair to the back of the room.
Every one of the great students I know is murdering themselves to try to stay in the B+/A- range.
A common refrain when people talk about this is "cheaters only cheat themselves" and while I think has historically been mostly true, I think it's bullshit now. Cheating is just too easy, the folks who care are losing the arms race. My most impressive peers are struggling to get past the first round of interviews. Meanwhile, the folks who don't show up to class and casually get perfect scores are also getting perfect scores on the online assessments. Almost all the competent people I know are getting squeezed out of the pipeline before they can compete on level-footing.
We've created a system that massively incentivizes cheating and then invented the ultimate cheating tool. A 4.0 and a good score on an online assessment used to be a great signal that someone was competent. I think these next few years, until universities and hiring teams adapt to LLMs, we're going to start seeing perfect scores as a red flag.
If sitting in the back and cheating guarantees a good grade, that's a shit school, honestly. The school seems to know that people cheat, and how, but nothing is being done. Randomize seating, have a proctor stand in the back of the class, suspend/expel people who are caught cheating.
Ya it drives me crazy. I know someone who scored an 81% on a midterm where a few people scored in the high 90%. The professor told them, that among the people they didn’t suspect of cheating, they got the highest score. No curve, no prosecution of the cheaters.
Look, I agree with the sibling that the school needs to do something about cheating.
Individual instructors should do something about it, even.
The fact that there is no feedback loop causing instructors to do this is a real problem.
If there were ever a stats page showing results in your compilers course were uncorrelated with understanding of compilers on a proctored exit exam you bet people would change or be fired.
So in a way, I blame the poor response on the systematic factors.
FWIW: When I was in undergrad, the students who showed up only for exams and sat in the back of the room were not cheating, and still ended up with some of the best scores.
They had opted out of the lectures, believing that they were inefficient or ineffective (or just poorly scheduled). Not everyone learns best in a lecture format. And not everyone is starting with the same level of knowledge of the topic.
Also:
> A 4.0 and a good score on an online assessment used to be a great signal that someone was competent
... this has never been true in my experience, as a student or hiring manager.
> FWIW: When I was in undergrad, the students who showed up only for exams and sat in the back of the room were not cheating, and still ended up with some of the best scores.
For many classes this is still the case, and I lump these folks in with the great students. They still care about learning the material.
My experience has been that these students are super common in required undergrad classes and not at all common in the graduate-level electives that I’ve seen this happening in.
> ... this has never been true in my experience, as a student or hiring manager.
Good to know. What’ve you focused on when you’re hiring?
For now, the plan is to move from Jupyter back to a text editor. Jupyter is very forgiving of mistakes. The model didn't work? Change some parameters and rerun the training cell. This is amazing for new folks, who are being bombarded by new information, and (it sounds like) for experienced folks who have already developed great habits around ML projects. But I think intermediate folks need a little friction to help hammer home why best practice is best practice.
I'm hoping the text editor + project directory approach helps force ML projects away from a single file and towards some sort of codified project structure. Sometimes it just feels like there's too much information in a file and it becomes hard to assign it to a location mentally (a bit like reading a physical copy of a tough book vs a kindle copy). Any advice or thoughts on this would be appreciated!
There's some good advice here but I want to push back one point:
> Get great, if not perfect grades.
I think this was great advice five years ago and just no longer works for the AI era. I'm back in school to get my masters and every single one of the best students is struggling to break into the A- territory, let alone get A's.
Cheating has simply gotten too easy.
I think it used to be that any class was separated into four groups. Best grades (A's) went to the best students, the good students got B's, and then there were the folks who were struggling. Some of these struggling folks would cheat, and sometimes do well, but for the most part they were in the high C-low B range.
AI has turned that on its head. Curves do not exist anymore. The cheaters get straight As on every assignment (tests included), the great students get Bs and the good students struggle to pass the class.
A few weeks ago I had a professor tell me that I did amazing on a test. My final grade was an 81% (a failing grade in a masters program). When I asked them what they meant saying I did well they told me that, of the people they didn't suspect of cheating, I got the highest score.
My advice is to do all the things that she listed and, whatever you do, don't focus on grades. It's a sisyphean task. Find what you enjoy in your courses, outside of the too, and spend time doing it. Crush any presentations you get. Find what makes you happy. Just, for the love of god, don't focus on your grades.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring.
No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
That is the point of OP's article yes, that and the idea that being "out of distribution" is increasingly important. This, mentioning his unique qualities (e.g. a Deep Mind internship) and not his similar qualities (everything else) would probably be pertinent
Eveyone needs to hire juniors, it's how seniors get made. Management thinks they're smart and have found a shortcut to save money, but it's only going to lead to degregation of skill at the senior level as well as raise the amount of money people that truly operate at a senior level can demand. I've already seen both happen where I work.
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood. It's a bad situation for both employers and candidates but there doesn't seem to be any practical alternative.
But then you're making it even worse by hiring inexperienced HR staff to do your hiring? Who mostly make their hiring decisions on whether they would want to have sex with a candidate.
> That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood.
Yes, this is a big factor. As an actively hiring manager, there's nothing worse than when HR enables receiving resumes through linkedin apply. We got a flood of many thousands of resumes. While I feel a duty to review them all, it's just flat out impossible so I had to skip most of them without reading.
On my most recent hire I'm glad HR stopped that and required people to file through the company website. Volume was reduced to many hundreds, which is more tractable. I still wasn't able to review them all, but at least a much higher percentage, like 60% instead of 2%
Resumes will be increasingly fake, at the same rate. We're already seeing this. Recently interviewed a guy clearly using AI interview cheating tools, which is much higher barrier and risk than just making up shit on your resume.
Ok - this obviously doesn't work everywhere but recently was flown to a city for an interview. Day long, full loop, 5 45 min interviews + 1 working session with a panel. Had dinner with the team the night before.
There's no way to cheat at that point. You either have what they need (yay btw) or its not a fit
Though honestly 40 years ago, sending out hundreds of cookie cutter applications by post wasn’t that hard.
I do agree that once someone gets through an initial filter and screen they should be willing to meet in person. That has costs on both sides but, during the tech boom, one heard a lot of complaints by applicants that they’re no going to travel for interviews, dinner, etc. <shrug>
When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
Matches my experience. 2 page resume is standard for senior careers, everything below should be 1 page. The reason is simple: I'm evaluating if you are able to summarize the most important points for how you're fitting into this role into a very limited space. This is a important skill that transfers to many other areas and isn't obvious just by looking at the extensive list of your degrees and job positions. I trashed applications for the sole reason when i felt that the applicant missed the whole point of why i'm reading their resume. Yet some hiring folks may prefer it the other way around so it's also a cultural fit filter in some way.
No idea about small companies but FAANG companies get > 1 million resume submission a year. You need to take that into account, the recruiters and other people in the chain do not have time to read your essay.
> I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.
I agree but then the reality is that we are here now, so it's no longer ridiculous. So if you are that brilliant, you understand that there is no point of fighting the current, so to make your life easier and to get the job where you can feel fulfillment, you might have to adjust your CV to fit the reality. That is a part of the intelligence you need to adapt and has always been.
Buddy, the amount of people these days with MASTER’S degrees that can’t even communicate via 2-3 (short) paragraph email exchanges… yep, it can be rough out there.
And juniors. I’m in a masters program right now and everyone’s got a network, it just happens to be filled with poor starving grad students instead of FAANG super stars :)
Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
Conversations like this are always well intentioned and friction truly is super useful to learning. But the ‘…’ in these conversations seems to always be implicating that we should inject friction.
There’s no need. I have peers who aren’t interested in learning at all. Adding friction to their process doesn’t force them to learn. Meanwhile adding friction to the process of my buddies who are avidly researching just sucks.
If your junior isn’t learning it likely has more to do with them just not being interested (which, hey, I get it) than some flaw in your process.
Start asking prospective hires what their favorite books are. It’s the easiest way to find folks who care.
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