[safog]

FWIW I worked at Amazon in one of these teams and it's not something I found very interesting. You get thrown a random binary that some ML researcher compiled with instructions to host-it. No sense of ownership over the product, you're just an Ops frontend for a researcher so they can do the fun stuff building models and you're dealing with the pagers.

[gardenhedge]

That sounds like the worst kind of tech position to be in

[closeparen]

It's about the same tier as BI dashboards. Huge breadths of data you don't produce but are nevertheless accountable for. All your stakeholders can easily stream-of-consciousness rattle off dozens of new metric/feature ideas or questions about the feature/metric values they're seeing over the course of 45 seconds, each one taking you tens of hours eyeballs deep in SQL to even begin to answer.

[quickthrower2]

A job we would be glad to have replace by an AI for sure

[theGnuMe]

That is certainly coming soon.

[LZ_Khan]

As a sort-of counterpoint I work at a non-amazon FANG where I am much more involved in model training and evaluation. I still have never needed to define a model myself, but it's much more complicated and far more ownership than someone throwing me a binary. I think that speaks much more to what's going on in Amazon *grins*.

[checkcircuits]

This has been my experience as a data engineer.

ML guys build the fun stuff, go to conferences, etc. We maintain their stuff and work the 60 hour weeks answering pages.

It's mind numbing. Arguably some of the most boring work I've ever done especially knowing that you're just a CI/CD robot. Nothing has motivated me towards looking into starting a business more than watching other people have fun and you cleaning up their messes.