Aside from the product value and market sentiment around M365 Copilot. One should wonder about the timing of this article so close to Microsoft's fiscal year end.
Would love to see a system that blends cheap lexical (Fulltext Search) or semantic/vector search using SQLite and chooses the best approach given the input.
If you want the best possible solution vertical for most business, I'd be looking at using Lucene for FTS duty.
Having the FTS engine provide a google-style snippet of the most relevant document chunk is the holy grail for RAG applications. Lucene does this kind of thing better than anyone else:
If you want to get to Director-level at a large tech company...it's a pretty binary process, you either strike gold on a high business impact project OR you follow the algorithm that's in the career guide and have people who can document and attest to the impact at the level.
Striking gold is a low probability medium impact event. Following the algorithm is a low probability low impact event...because you make lots of trade-offs on quality of life, generalizable skills, and personal goals. There's also lots of competition along the way. So it just depends on which game you want to play.
If you have any semblance of personal goals/interests you need to stop worrying about following someone else's career advancement algorithm and maybe consider adapting it to incorporate your own heuristics. This is where I've settled in my approach to career goals. But it's highly specific to where you are at with other parts of your life.
This is such good advice. Other than domain experience and or networks of relationships that can help introduce them to domain problems...I wonder how people get exposed to what software to build/problems to solve?
> The amount of influence you have through educational content is truly massive, and can make or break even the largest tech companies.
This is true, but it neglects the "spark" that's required to get some sort of amplification to the content and related downstream benefits. Companies spend money on marketing, events, etc.
For INDIVIDUALS who want the ancillary benefits of educational content, they use tools to create and deploy across multiple channels and also engage with others ("shit post", "reply guy", etc.) that drive attention to their content.
For an individual, driving economic outcomes with educational content (on average) seems like an investment with low probability of success. I suspect that many individuals who create educational content are doing it because they are passionate about the topic, and do not expect any other benefit.
Thanks for posting, something that I'm thinking about a lot in the age of increasing participation in "Tech" and ever-increasing amounts of content while simultaneously divided attention.
This is a great response. I'm about 10 years sooner in my career than you. With young kids at home...I'm still holding hope that I can effectively balance my own health, family, spirituality, etc. with a product/technology I'm passionate about.
Maybe I'm just not seeking out the right groups/networks...but I increasingly struggle to trade-off a project that I'm passionate about with time spent focusing on health/family.
I remember going to a psychiatrist for the first time when I was around 30 and I told him "well there is fun code and unfun code". I was explaining how I hated my job at the time I had to write unfun code all day long but my side projects, that was fun code.
He looked at me like I was literally a crazy person and said, "Ok, explain more what you mean by un-fun code..."
At the time I sighed and thought oh geeze, this is so painfully obvious how do I even explain the difference. BUT looking back now, nope. He was right. That is crazy. It's all just code. The people and your attitude make all the difference.
Before enlightenment: write code, fix bugs. After enlightenment: write code, fix bugs.
> pick one and fall in love with your co-workers, make them friends, and do tech for the sake of tech.
Not caring about what you are building and why is how we got here. Too many hyper focused people in tech only interested if they could do things without wondering if they should.
Precisely how we now have technology-oligarchs who got rich off of the work of such single minded people now destroying the country.
Enough people thinking like this is what has led to people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin to thrive and become influential.
Sure that algorithm is cool and all but it’s been used for techno-fascism.
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