"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.

Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.

It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you softball interviews, you just don't get to interview anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a backboard for "interviews".

It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.

Ed is the anger translator in my head. Good stuff.

Fellow Midwesterner?

Totally agree. Adult life is just mentally taxing. I'm more curious and more eager to learn now in my 30s than I was in any of my schooling. The learning isn't hard but the energy regulation is.

I think it's so easy for people to discount "mental energy" since culturally we don't often acknowledge it as a finite resource the same way we do physical energy. Well maybe the problem is we view them as separate things in the first place.

When I was younger I just didn't have to worry about so much stuff.

This thread is a really good point. I am in my late 50ies now im really good with computer hardware because I started when I was 11. But I started wanting to become a SCI-FI writer at 35 and it has been an up hill battle to get good at for all the reason described in this thread.

Agree immensely. As an adult, I worry about taxes, my health insurance, making doctor’s appointments, etc.

They said they're going to invest like $150B over five years. Which is quite a bit smaller than other big tech firms.

They have their Granite family of models, but they're small language models so surely significantly less resources are going into them.

There's no "end" per se, but shifting dynamics. I personally think we are currently seeing a "slow", but noteworthy-in-hindsight, shift in interest and development of alternative options and platforms from the big tech monopolies. From things like Bluesky, Framework laptops, minimalist cell phones, and even smaller local language models and other types of useful local ML models.

I don't think it's going to be anything like 50% or even 30% of users using non-flagship hardware or software products. But it could still be significant. And I think the more important thing isn't going to be market share as much as proof of viability. More successful examples will beget more.

It's about planting seeds from which future digital ecosystems can grow -- that have interoperability, functionality, and openness built into their foundations.

I believe that what drove you to make this post and the way I feel is not unique and are part of a larger swell in similar sentiments.

You throw in other factors too like the mass tech layoffs and the continued doubling down of tech barons on their cravings to intermingle with the surveillance state and military industrial complex... I just can't see how the future doesn't have more people disillusioned with the current state of the tech industry.

I think big tech will continue to overplay their hand and the mess that comes after will be an opportunity to give people what they want and show alternatives to what's already been done that we know won't work out.

They got the current administration to ban state level regulation for them. Not to mention various defense contracts. They are government subsidized.

Yup, it is. It's my bread and butter too. So much so I decided to just do it for myself and start my own consulting company.

Being a solutions engineer at the right companies means you get to be one of the few people with full end-to-end visibility of the entire lifecycle of both a client and the technology adoption, deployment, optimization, maintenance, etc. process. And you'll get to see it dozens or hundreds of times for a variety of clients across industries. Again though, totally depends on the company.

@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.

In my experience, it just entirely depends on the company. Different companies will use the same title and they can have wildly different mixtures of pre vs post sales involvement. My career has all been customer/client facing technical roles. Titles range from:

- support engineer

- solutions engineer

- sales engineer

- applied engineer

- forward deployed engineer

- solutions / sales architect

- field engineer

And that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to deploy, etc. but deals with clients.

I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those roles if you're wanting a role focused almost entirely on post-sales.

(I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the director of research at his company and has had to wear a "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)

I should probably date myself, most of this wasn't true 10+ years ago. forward deployed/field, yep, Palantir has kind of owned that. Solutions Architect has definitely been cross functional for a long time, but solutions engineer is a title that I am pretty confident was post-sales first. I A/B tested the title back in 2014 between Product Analyst (candidates too junior), Support Engineer (too much IT/back office support, not enough experience w/ paying customers). Solutions Engineer hit a sweet spot and brought in the best candidates: Generalists who aren't really sure what they want to do, but with broad access to code/product/engineers and customers eventually find a speciality they like.

Because these folks are problem solvers, the title brought a reputation which is exactly why the sales folks wanted to co-opt the title. It conveyed trust and experience. When used well, it's still a good fit in pre-sales for building out POCs and delivering value, but more often than not, it's just sales engineering where they're qualing out potential customers that aren't worth the time of the sales team. Which is fine, except that this is MY title :)

To be clear, I take this a little personally as I was an early adopter of the title. It's kind of like those folks that get annoyed when you're a fan of a band that they liked before you ever heard of them, I admit it.