The best way is to make sure you ACCOMPLISH something. I did the same as you and actually got a massively better role after my startup failed. The reason was because I accomplished something that's hard to accomplish.
How about you get a client before leaving? You should be able to find someone to pay for what you're making. If you can't work an additional 10,15,20 hrs per week at a cushy FAANG job and get a client you probably shouldn't leave to work the brutal life of rejection building a new company entails.
> They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Was that your first tech onsite? The onsite is an interview you have to pass, you're not guaranteed an offer. Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
Honestly, sucks to fly out far and get rejected but that's part of the process my guy. Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
Fwiw, every time I "meet the team after interviewing", it literally is just to meet the team. If there were any technical exercises involved, I'd expect an agenda or some kind of heads up. And it makes sense to wait for the technical evaluation before scheduling this sort of meeting, imo.
For bigger orgs, this is a chance to sanity check team fit and potentially re-route if longer-term interests align better with some other team. For startups, it can be more of a vibe check.
Not my first on site either, but normally I'd just need to go through a phone screen and a tech test to secure an onsite, not many hours of interviewing. Plus, I just listened to what the recruiter told me through the phone and confirmed through the email.
Why would I think I'd need to go over another round of interviews after spending over 4 hours interviewing remotely, plus interviewing with engineers, to do it all over again?
> ...why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
I have several reasons for not bringing my personal hardware to a corporate interview, and a couple about the specific situation as described:
* I wouldn't travel with my laptop to an on-site that was described as a meet-and-greet.
* The recruiter promised suitable hardware would be available at the surprise technical on-site interview: "Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided."
* For many companies processing corporate data on personal, not-managed-by-the-business hardware is a firing offense.
* Grabassery happens, but if it's clear that my potential employer is an established company that is unable to plan ahead far enough to ensure that the interview has the hardware and personnel required for the interview, that's a _huge_ red flag for me... and one that's good to get out of the way early.
> Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
I’m not really “in tech” but this sounds like some bullshit for me. What if you don’t have a personal laptop? All I’ve got is a desktop machine, because my personal devices aren't for work.
After after going through a whole crapload of interviews, "most" onsites definitely are not 5 hours. They certainly are a thing. Some are even longer. But out of around 25 interviews, only three places requested that much time (I declined two of them).
Wow this is simply not true, Microsoft Clarity is free forever and has better analytics. I recommend it to any founder or builder because it comes with free unlimited heatmap.
As a former user of both (for work), I agree and would never use either for my own projects when I can easily set up a self-hosted cookieless matomo instance.
Otoh, my former compliance officer much preferred using MS's product since it explicitly states that it's GDPR and CCPA compliant, while regulator and court decisions against google analytics were piling up in one of the markets we served (EU).
There is also the ePrivacy Directive. From what at the moment seems to me (it changes), it is in principle possible to make a GDPR compliant web analytics SaaS. But it might not be possible to avoid compliance banners given the current ePrivacy Directive. But most people don't know that thing exists.
I have used google analytics, clarity, and fathom for work, and self-hosted matomo for personal projects. Clarity was the worst in terms of traffic analytics. It's more of a poor hotjar alternative than anything.
It really depends on what you want to do. Research (Foundational model layer)? Build cool LLM apps for work or play (application layer)?
Honestly the best way to start is to play with the tools excessively. Prompting over and over and over again will teach you amazing skills and intuitions.
Seeking co-founder | B2B AI | Engineering cofounder | NYC Only
Heya, I'm looking for a cofounder who is interested in making LLM tools for businesses. We already have a paying customer paying significant $$$. I'm a senior engineer who is looking for other talented engineers. Ideal person is in NYC and is playing around with langchain or similar LLM tools. You can still be at your job while we experiment together, no need to quit.
If you're using a regex it's a smell that there is a better tool for what you need to do. A ton of if statements is a much more readable way of writing code than regex.
Respectfully, no. If you're trying to write a full blown language parser then regexps are the wrong tool, but a 50 line function doing the job of a regexp has a really funky code smell. Comment your regexps*, and use a parser when your usecase outgrows regexps, but a blanket ban on regexps smells of "I'm not smart enough to understand them".
Unfortunately regex is the best we have. A bunch of if statements is also a whole less efficient and prone to errors than a regex statement. Once you start to learn regex, it actually isn't that bad. The challenging part is that a lot of people cut and paste not really understanding it and you end up with a bunch of bad regex examples.
Eh, I think the challenging part is understanding a complex regex that's already been written. You really do need good comments and unit tests to go along with a regex in order to understand the intent, otherwise they rapidly become unmaintainable.
This is a good example of bad use of AI. If your developer wrote code and tried to open a PR without talking to anyone, without testing, without an observability plan, without even running the code to make sure there are no errors, that would be crazy!
Good AI systems will do all the above.
Sorry to plug, but if you're a developer interested in building on top of langchain and building similar tech, please email me (in my profile). I'm a senior developer looking to collab.
Open source does NOT equal safe, it's actually worse. If you release something that can wreak havoc and it's open source, it will ALWAYS be out there, no off switch.
Imagine we later discover that an open source LLM is way more powerful than we realize. For example GPT-3 is pretty powerful but it really hasn't been out a while. Imagine what we discover it can do in 3-5 years, without even accounting for more advanced models like GPT-4 which is already out. Imagine someone discovers some really powerful, dangerous capability years down the line.
People can't imagine what can go wrong with LLMs, but think about the recourse we have for bad behavior online now: arresting people, forcing legal action against individuals/companies, sanctions or financial repercussions. Notice these aren't technical barriers, these are social barriers. You can't do these things again language models!
This. If the idea of doing sales or marketing at a small startup turns you off, don't become an indie hacker because that is your main job - to promote what you've made.
How about you get a client before leaving? You should be able to find someone to pay for what you're making. If you can't work an additional 10,15,20 hrs per week at a cushy FAANG job and get a client you probably shouldn't leave to work the brutal life of rejection building a new company entails.