jameshush

I focus on realtime voice AI uses cases and nemotron's time to first token is INSANELY fast. It's become a legit option for voice use cases

I'm one of the most pro-AI support/solutions/FDE engineers you'll find, and I really don't see AI taking away support and hand holding.

Even though I use AI to answer questions large customers would still rather wait for a weekly meeting to ask a question or have someone fly onsite then write the same question in an email or to a chatbot and get a near instant answer

Are you making less than 130k total comp in NYC while doing AI stuff as an engineer?

I'd highly recommend looking for a new job.

For the best experience, you'll still want it to communicate with 3rd party APIs to handle the speech to text, text to speech, and LLM.

This is more of a VAD/turn detection issue. It's gotten a lot better over the last few years, but it's a hard problem. The extra ~100ms of latency makes a huge difference otherwise, especially when you have use cases that require tool calling that can easily add 500ms+ of latency.

I expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands.

Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)

Had the pleasure of working with Alex while at System1. Great guy. If I remember correctly I got one tiny change merged into Waterfox that's probably since been undone in the years since :-).

@cootsnuck, if I didn't really love working with the people/company I'm at now, I'd also start my own consulting company.

Once I realized you really only need 3-5 consistent customers (well, you only REALLY NEED one customer), and you can generally keep customers and employees happy by responding quickly and doing what you say you'll do (aka not taking on work you can't handle) I'm confident I could branch out on my own if I ever wanted to.

It might be role-specific. I'm a solutions engineer. A large portion of my time is spent making demos for customers. LLMs have been a game-changer for me, because not only can I spit out _more_ demos, but I can handle more edge cases in demos that people run into. E.g. for example, someone wrote in asking how to use our REST API with Python.

I KNOW a common issue people run into is they forget to handle rate limits, but I also know more JavaScript than Python and have limited time, so before I'd write:

``` # NOTE: Make sure to handle the rate limit! This is just an example. See example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example for a js example doing this. ```

Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers would just ignore the comment, forget to handle the rate limit, and then write in a few months later. With Claude, I just write "Create a customer demo in Python that handles rate limits. Use example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example as a reference," and it gets me 95% of the way there.

There are probably 100 other small examples like this where I had the "vibe" to know where the customer might trip over, but not the time to plug up all the little documentation example holes myself. Ideally, yes, hiring a full-time person to handle plugging up these holes would be great, but if you're resource constrained paying Anthropic for tokens is a much faster/cheaper solution in the short term.

1000%. When the sale doesn't go through, it's the salesperson's fault. When the product doesn't work, it's the "real" engineer's fault. When everything works, the client gives you a high five.

If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real" engineers.

As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo kinda works during the call, you're 10/10.

At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a level above your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers, you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.

Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team, and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference thing.

This is one of the few hills I will die on. After working on a team that used Phabricator for a few years and going back to GitHub when I joined a new company, it really does make life so much nicer to just rebase -> squash -> commit a single PR to `main`

I agree with you for many use cases, but for the use case I'm focused on (Voice AI) speed is absolutely everything. Every millisecond counts for voice, and most voice use cases don't require anything close to "deep thinking. E.g., for inbound customer support use cases, we really just want the voice agent to be fast and follow the SOP.

I'm Canadian. My parents are British. I always thought we spelt all words the same until now

Why bother doing that when a non-engineer can just change the prompt and output a different result? :shrug:

When I went through the grind, I just would open up levels.fyi and check the salaries whenever I felt like giving up.

Now that I have a wife and kid, its very easy to find motivation to do things I don't want to do to provide for my family :P

Great advice. Sometimes you need to take a step back to take three steps forward.

Referrals are the key.

Referrals are the key to non-FAANG jobs. I also have over 10 years of experience, with six of those years spent working under the same supervisor across two different jobs. Four of those years were two different jobs, thanks to strong referrals from my previous boss and the one I worked with for 6 years before that.

I fumbled a bit early in my career and burned some bridges, but luckily, I smartened up after the first 2ish years.

I figured if I have 10+ years of experience and do not have at least 5-10 people I can call up to ask for a job who've worked with me in the past, I've screwed up. Investing in relationships has been the key job security hack for me (also a completely average React dev who happens to know an above-average amount about video and webrtc).

Your logic works out fine if you don't mind a dash of risk (e.g. from a job loss). But when I ran the numbers from my perspective it didn't seem worth it. (I might be doing my math wrong).

Let's say I get a car that costs $30k, I put $10k down, and I take a loan out using the numbers above rounded up just for napkin math (1% APR, 4% savings account).

After one year:

```

$30,000 x 0.04 = $1,200 from savings account interest

$1,200 x 0.33 = $396 in TAXES from the interest (assuming you earn over $145k/year in California)

$30,000 x 0.01 = $300 in loan interest

Total earned = $1,200 - $396 - $300 = $696

```

Don't get me wrong, $696 isn't _nothing_ but I personally would rather have the feeling of not owing people money then an extra $696 at the end of the year. Add in depreciation from getting a new car and it's almost a wash.

I worked at the company that acquired MapQuest a few years ago. It's been bought and sold a few times, but their most popular feature is still the "print maps" button...

As you can guess it's mostly people over the age of 50 still using MapQuest lol

Unless I'm reading the wrong pricing page, Duolingo Max seems to cost $29.99/month. In my experience learning Chinese, it costs $15-20 an hour to find a decent teacher online with whom to practice via video call. A few teachers charge less than $10 an hour, but they are very weak. Seems pretty darn reasonable for me, especially since I'm guessing they have at least $10/month in costs just paying for the LLM.

I'll add to this: If you want to practice following up but are afraid of "bugging" someone, start by wishing 1-3 people happy birthday every day. I put every person I know birthday on one giant Google calendar and wish people happy every day. It's a super easy way to at least say "hi" to someone once a year.

Anecdote from me: I jumped from leading an engineering team for an online virtual events company to working as a solutions engineer for a WebRTC vendor.

They asked for a reference from my previous CEO.

I had left on good terms (gave 4 weeks' notice) and was incredibly professional while working with the previous CEO, so I got a glowing reference. If I had been an ass, it'd be unlikely I'd have gotten such a great reference and got this job. ~6 months later, we even scored my previous CEO as a customer.

The tech world is SMALL. Especially if you niche down career-wise, it's possible to find yourself in a situation where only a couple hundred people worldwide have the same expertise as you. At that level, people would instead work with people they know or have strong references from people they know.

I'm a foreigner who's live in Taiwan over the past four years. You can move here tomorrow if you want :D. You can survive with English (though your life will be easier with Mandarin), and there are plenty of English teachers who never learned Mandarin who've lived here for 10+ years.

Highly recommend living here. I met my wife here. Life's chill. Nobody steals. If you've made at least $60k in salary at least once in the last three years you can apply for a Taiwan Gold Card (kinda like a Taiwanese O1 Visa) and come live/work here very easily.

The main reason I continue to learn Mandarin is because my mother in law speaks zero English, so it just makes everyone's live's more fun and pleasant if I speak some Mandarin. :D

My wife teaches Chinese, and this is spot on our situation. Schools and language centers are always hiring. She usually has 1-2 private online students she tutors (generally adults who are learning Chinese for fun). As long as she commits to a semester at a time and doesn't leave in the middle of her semester, she can always return to her job. If we have kids, she can go part-time or be a full-time mom for a few years. Every school teaches the same stuff, so it's not like she has to "keep up" like I do as an engineer and learn new things every few years.

Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.

Over the last 10 years, I've gotten every job except one through Hacker News or a referral from a co-worker I met at a job. I got way more callbacks fresh out of school as a 21-year-old living in Canada (aka no USA work permits) via Hacker News than any other channel.

Focus on sending 3-4 _excellent_ applications a day rather than 3000-4000 AI-generated garbage ones. Also, go through your text message history and text every person on there the following:

``` Hi $NAME! I just saw you on $SOCIAL_MEDIA doing $THING and I thought about you? What's the latest with you? No rush to respond if you're busy.

wait for response

Great to hear! I'm currently looking for a software engineering job, do you know anyone who's hiring? ```

You do those two things consistently, you'll have three job offers within 3-4 months.

Now the tricky part is getting the confidence to ACTUALLY DO THE ABOVE. What helped me is going outside and getting involved in ANY club. In the past for me it's been salsa dancing, stand up comedy, and taking a cooking class. Replace those with any other activity you're remotely interested.

Good luck. You got this. The first job or two in tech is tricky. After 3-4 years it gets way easier.

Genuine question: What's the motivation for getting a PhD in an engineering field? I’m guessing you just really really love researching and have enough money/low enough lifestyle to take the oppertunity cost financial hit of not working in industry for five years?

Anecdotally I’m using Kapi trained on our docs to help answer customer questions and its amazing at getting answers to level 1 support. We still need to edit the answers but editing something 90% right is much faster then searching the docs ourselves.

Invest in skills that pay money and spend less then you make.

Skills are key because they’re inflation-proof, and no person or government can ever take them away

For context, as a newly married couple, we spend 80% of our time in Taiwan and 20% in Spain. My job pays the vast majority of our income. I’m Canadian/British, and she’s Taiwanese.

The day after we legally married, I added her as a beneficiary to all my investment and retirement accounts.

In Europe, we keep Euros in one WISE account for which we both have a card.

Culturally, in Taiwan, there isn’t a joint checking account. However, she has the banking password and can transfer money. Banks also let her do whatever she wants with my account as long as she bring my bank stamp.

Also culturally, its important for women to have their own stash of money (私房錢 si fang qian) that’s a psychological safety net. She has that in her own account, it basically just sits there. It’s less then 3% of our net worth and makes her feel safe so I don’t mind.

Every week I take a look at what we spend and make sure we’re on track budget wise in YNAB. We pick our big savings goal together and pool the rest of our money together.

I highly recommend pooling everything together. It makes life a lot more convenient and keeps you both accountable to the goals you’ve set together. If one partner really needs some money saved on the side, that can work (works for us) but all paychecks going forward being pooled makes life simple.

I have multiple "mentors" for various aspects of my life. I don't call them "mentors," though; I generally call them "buddies."

There's plenty of successful people 10-20 years older than you, who want nothing more to tell a younger person what to do and then have them ACTUALLY FOLLOW the advice they are given.

I have a close friend who's about 12 years older than me. He told me I'm the only person he talks to who actually takes action on the advice he gives. Because of that, he gives me more advice (pro tip: none of it is complicated).

My recommendation is to ask people for small pieces of advice who you respect, implement the small things, then follow up and thank them for their advice and show them you've implemented it. Sooner then later, they'll start sharing more unsolicited advice that you can continue to follow.

Joining an organization (club, church, or charity) where you can be around people who are older than you is a great way to bump into people like this.