Executive director at Timaeus. Working on singular learning theory and developmental interpretability.
Website: jessehoogland.com
Twitter: @jesse_hoogland
Executive director at Timaeus. Working on singular learning theory and developmental interpretability.
Website: jessehoogland.com
Twitter: @jesse_hoogland
I have to respond to the fractional sweets thing.
My partner’s parents (her dad mostly) enforced an 8-point rule around candy. One m&m = 1 point; 1 starburst = 4…
The consequence? She developed an unhealthy relationship to candy and would binge on sugary garbage whenever with friends whose parents did not enforce the rule. She didn’t get a chance to discover her own limits for herself.
Contrast with my upbringing: there just wasn’t candy in house, and my parents were relatively relaxed outside the house (granted breakfast was still garbagey cereal but standards change). I never had a problem over consuming candy.
I guess the takeaway is that (human-)enforced moderation is much more fragile than passive (environmentally enforced) moderation.
But then, if I consider how different our siblings are from us (my brother has way more of a sweet tooth, and my partner’s sister had less of a sweet tooth than her), I’d have to conclude that none of this matters, kids are their own creatures, and everything I just wrote only counts as the weakest possible kind of evidence. Oh well.
Hey Winston, thanks for writing this out. This is something we talked a lot about internally. Here are a few thoughts:
Comparisons: At 35k a year, it seems it might be considerably lower than industry equivalent even when compared to other programs
I think the more relevant comparison is academia, not industry. In academia, $35k is (unfortunately) well within in the normal range for RAs and PhD students. This is especially true outside the US, where wages are easily 2x − 4x lower.
Often academics justify this on the grounds that you’re receiving more than just monetary benefits: you’re receiving mentorship and training. We think the same will be true for these positions.
The actual reason is that you have to be somewhat crazy to even want to go into research. We’re looking for somewhat crazy.
If I were applying to this, I’d feel confused and slightly underappreciated if I had the right set of ML/Software Engineering skills but to be barely paid subsistence level for my full-time work (in NY).
If it helps, we’re paying ourselves even less. As much as we’d like to pay the RAs (and ourselves) more, we have to work with what we have.
Of course… money is tight: The grant constraint is well acknowledged here. But potentially the number of RAs expected to hire can be further down adjusted as while potentially increasing the submission rate of the candidates that truly fits the requirement of the research program.
For exceptional talent, we’re willing to pay higher wages.
The important thing is that both funding and open positions are exceptionally scarce. We expect there to be enough strong candidates who are willing to take the pay cut.
All in all, we’re expecting most of our hires to come from outside the US where the cost of living is substantially lower. If lower wages are a deal-breaker for anyone but you’re still interested in this kind of work, please flag this in the form. The application should be low-effort enough that it’s still worth applying.
You can find a v0 of an SLT/devinterp reading list here. Expect an updated reading list soon (which we will cross-post to LW).
Now that the deadline has arrived, I wanted to share some general feedback for the applicants and some general impressions for everyone in the space about the job market:
My number one recommendation for everyone is to work on more legible projects and outputs. A super low-hanging fruit for >50% of the applications would be to clean up your GitHub profiles or to create a personal site. Make it really clear to us which projects you’re proud of, so we don’t have to navigate through a bunch of old and out-of-use repos from classes you took years ago. We don’t have much time to spend on every individual application, so you want to make it really easy for us to become interested in you. I realize most people don’t even know how to create a GitHub profile page, so check out this guide.
We got 70 responses and will send out 10 invitations for interviews.
We rejected a reasonable number of decent candidates outright because they were looking for part-time work. If this is you, don’t feel dissuaded.
There were quite a few really bad applications (...as always): poor punctuation/capitalization, much too informal, not answering the questions, totally unrelated background, etc. Two suggestions: (1) If you’re the kind of person who is trying to application-max, make sure you actually fill in the application. A shitty application is actually worse than no application, and I don’t know why I have to say that. (2) If English is not your first language, run your answers through ChatGPT. GPT-3.5 is free. (Actually, this advice is for everyone).
Between 5 and 10 people expressed interest in an internship option. We’re going to think about this some more. If this includes you, and you didn’t mention it in your application, please reach out.
Quite a few people came from a data science / analytics background. Using ML techniques is actually pretty different from researching ML techniques, so for many of these people I’d recommend you work on some kind of project in interpretability or related areas to demonstrate that you’re well-suited to this kind of research.
Remember that job applications are always noisy. We almost certainly made mistakes, so don’t feel discouraged!