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- Hacker News
- this reads like AI slop.by timr
- ai slop article, but if you want to maximize earnings in any tech boom the best opportunities lie at the companies driving that boom.by vanuatu
- > The median ML engineer in Germany earns 70,000 euros.
The numbers are stuck at 2018 levels. Accumulated inflation since then is over 20%. This bubble is not glamorous at all.
- > an AI engineer in the US at 146,000 to 189,000, a median of 70,000 euros in Germany, 111,000 francs in Zurich.
Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?
- Pangram flags this post as 100% AI
- Don’t need any tool to identify this as slop:
> Here is the short version, with numbers and links.
> The one-paragraph summary:
by rogerrogerr - > In AI Engineer postings the skill "prompt engineering" appears 8.9% of the time, RAG 13.6%. *The skill stayed, the job dissolved into other roles*.
That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.
by visarga - > That is exactly what working with small and mid-size businesses looks like: find the process where AI pays off, build the agent or the integration, and get it to the people who will use it.
This is exactly right.
I’m making good side money from building and integrating “AI” with small business tools.
Custom CRMs and tracking solutions so they don’t have to buy salesforce etc…
Notably this doesn’t reliably work for juniors, which supports the article.
You need to already have experience making enterprise scale software, otherwise you’re going to miss some massive authentication or data exposure problem.
I anticipate the return of the software consulting company like initech, but instead of having Tom and Milton and Samir and Peter etc…, you only have Lumburgh and Michael Bolton.
- Mostly title inflation. Using GPT API does not make you an "AI engineer". I don't even know if anyone would seriously call themselves this. Usually they are either software developers that actually work at an AI company or a researcher. The others are mostly fake jobs.
I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022.
Edit: https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer Most jobs involving engineering don't even have AI included in their title at OpenAI, though they do have Applied AI engineers and AI support engineers. I highly doubt these other companies suddenly have a huge growth of AI engineering jobs available.
- I interview a lot of larping 'AI engineers' that either vibe coded a side project or were involved in low stakes pilots
Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it
by vanuatu - What's the best way to get into any kind of frontier training or inference? Obviously OpenAI and Anthropic would be great, but I would love to work at inference literally anywhere. LLMs are super cool and I want more systems problems. Or is the boat sailed and it's too hard to get in?
My current issue is that solo learning and bootstrapping is hella expensive money wise and my current job doesn't pay that much either.
by sigbottle - I am glad that I just retired. I find AI super fascinating but navigating a SW development career in the next few years looks like a daunting task.by vjvjvjvjghv
- These lists must be hallucinating.
> AI Engineer. Number one on LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise in the US two years running, number one at Robert Half. About 1,550 new US postings a week, median 176,000 dollars. This is the engineer who puts LLMs into products: RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluation.
I'm doing all those things. The RAG work was interesting, but putting it on my resume has done nothing. Nobody is hiring. I have recent multi-year FAANG experience too. Before 2023 I could blast out 10 resumes and get at least 8 or so hits with multiple offers. Now I can send out 100 resumes and lucky if I get a single rejection letter. I am seeing the same thing reported by other white-collar working people like HR reps and project managers in all industries. There is definitely a stealth recession/depression scenario playing out right now and has been for at least the last two years.
by y-c-o-m-b - Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?by orangedog
- There are no jobs. For at least two years now most IT/AI hiring ads are fake.
- >Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late?
This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
by ramesh31 - Maybe - as with most ultra competitive industries you either know someone or have some extremely niche yet hyper productive knowledge others don’t have.by cityoften
- It’s for sure not too late, why would it be? The industry is young and evolving. It’s not even clear what an AI job is exactly, the definition and job titles have been changing a lotby dgellow
- Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.by peezd
- I did by applying
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
by vanuatu - We hire “AI engineers,” and honestly the expectation most of the time is that they can demonstrate an actual interest and real work in or with AI. Mind you, we are not a frontier lab, but AI gaming company, and someone with senior dev knowledge is hugely valuable to the team if they actually have rolled up their sleeves and built with AI and push to improve our operations with AI. There isn’t an academic signal that would tell us you are really AI forward, and so much of the engineering job is super charged by having a real dev background for us.
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
- > Will AI replace developers? The Stanford data shows a tilt toward seniority rather than mass displacement: entry for 22 to 25 year olds is suffering, older workers are growing. WEF expects a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2030.
As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.
by pauletienney - > I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened.
In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time.
To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain.
(I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
by vouaobrasil - Wasn’t this already the trend before LLMs?
I remember getting primarily tech lead or other high-senior position listings when doing job searches since at least a couple years
by ozgrakkurt - I'm pretty convinced that manual coding will be done by late 2027 for at least webdev. At that point the optimal workflow will be coders controlling agents.
Not too far after it will be coders controlling agents who control agents who do the work.
We're in for a very tumultuous few years
by Maxion