For the record: that's not a "strong work ethic."
That's exploiting young unattached engineers and spinning it as "team culture."

Toxic 💀💀

That's not something to aspire to. That's not good management. If you're working sustained 70+ hrweeks, somebody is taking advantage of you.
We have fetishized the overworked engineer. It's toxic but so pervasive that Mr. Ng (and others) feel it's ok to advertise as a positive.
Having this as "culture" breeds a monoculture of unattached, young engineers. Not good for them & not good for your company long term.
It's not good for them because their first job burns them out and physically wears them down. This happened to me and many of my coworkers.
And I don't mean "I got tired, but then slept." I took almost a year off from working (privilege!) & still had wrist pain and lack of "go."
It wrecks you. Not just me; to everyone around me.
If your company is asking for sustained 70+ hrs they're hurting you & they know it.
It's bad for the company too. Breeds a monoculture, and deifies lack of experience. What veteran programmer wants to work 70+hrs sustained?
What person with a family can or would want to spend 70+ hrs most weeks on something they own so little of.
What person with outside responsibilities can make time for literally almost two jobs worth of work?
When you're requiring 70+ hrs most weeks, you're not saying "have a strong work ethic" you're saying "I don't want to pay for this work."
Your "culture" dooms your infrastructure, reliability, & product to underpaid, overworked, unseasoned engineers who you'll burn & discard.
To be very clear: it's not the employees. They're doing their best. It's the
CEO/C-team & the short-gain-at-long-expense tactic they chose.
If you can, if you have the choice, when you see this in a job rec. run the other direction. Fast.
They want to burn you up for their gain.
In the end, your employment in this culture is trading your time, your youth, and the wellbeing of your body & mind for their gain.
Beware.

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/
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