Career choice matters more more more than skills
Why I would be a great engineer
Long time no see, my weirdo friends! I've been super busy at work because I need to deploy our entire LLM pipeline, and deployment causes me a lot of pain. But I want to share with you how much I've grown and seen in myself.
If you have read my post, Pitch yourself like an alpha male, you probably know that two months ago, I felt incompetent in my engineering skills compared to my housemate. He was much more comfortable bragging about his engineering achievements and got all the startups to listen to him at the career fair, even though he was a designer with several engineering projects. In contrast, I felt like I was nothing but a data scientist trying to transition to AI/LLM engineering.
Now, I'm in my fourth week of my LLM in engineering, and I need to deploy my pipeline. However, many things went wrong. We need to launch our product on Friday, but our original system had trouble integrating with Python until Wednesday. I spent my Wednesday and Thursday trying out the second system, but after I got it working, I realized it would only work halfway due to their internal timeout setting system on Thursday, AFTERNOON.
At that point, my founder suggested, "Why don't we switch to another system again for an hour? If it doesn't work, we can rewrite all the code in TypeScript." It was Thursday afternoon, and I was already tired. But now, I need to deploy an entirely new backend on a new system before tomorrow (?)
But I made it at 11:30 p.m. in the office. Can you believe it, my weirdo friends? I can't believe it either. I understood everything and solved all the problems in just a few hours. I thought I was God.
The funny thing is, when I was ranting about my deployment problems with my confident housemate, I realized how much I had grown. Though he was confident in pitching his engineering skills, he ended up deciding to go back to his designer job. When we were chatting about our deployment problem, as usual, he told me it was easy this and that, but I didn't believe him anymore because I experienced that handling things in production is much more difficult. Besides, I felt confident that I would be a much better engineer than he would. It's not because I'm smarter, but because I chose to be an engineer while he chose to be a designer.
If I spend 40 more hours per week than him working on engineering problems, no matter how dumb I am, it is quite impossible that I would not be better than him in a year because that's 2000+ hours! Even if you only look at this crazy week, you can probably tell how much I've learned already.
And that's when I realized that "good skills = good career" is complete bullshit. Most people think that if someone has amazing skills, then they will get a good job and progress better. But the reality is that most people don't have the courage to change careers or choose the right one because they need to start everything again with so many uncertainties, and life will become uncomfortable due to the big pay cut...
But that choice will also define what we will be working on for the majority of our time, which problem in the world we will be solving every day, what skillset we will be practicing, and what we are doing for our overwork... And all that learning accumulates. If it is the wrong direction, it makes it harder for us to change because we've invested so much. But if it is the right direction, we have already accumulated a significant amount in a year. Looking at myself in the past four weeks of learning in this AI startup, it will be hard to believe that I won't be a good engineer next year. That's when I learned why the choice matters more. I’m on the way for more great work!
Thank you for listening to my little story today.