Megan Hopp-Khodov

Call me crazy, but I think LinkedIn could easily improve its reputation and gain a lot of goodwill and trust if they treated the site more like the office instead of Tinder by doing a few simple things it could do today: 1. Only allowed people to post jobs if they first validated their profile using CLEAR / etc to prove they are human. This would stop all the fake jobs posted by people with data science backgrounds who are clearly just running illegal studies by posting ghost jobs, and allow LinkedIn to get better metrics on the real market so it can provide useful recommendations. Sunlight would disinfect a lot. 2. Gave people realistic spam filters on LinkedIn messages. Let me block people who have not proved they are human instead of generative AI, let me block people who don't fit user specific regulatory requirements such as Residency in a specific country or ability to be held accountable to a specific legal jurisdiction, and usage of LinkedIn as a virtual global office will skyrocket. LinkedIn likes to pretend that it's the business version of social media but I've never worked at a company that did not force people to prove that they are who and what they claimed to be. LinkedIn allows fake accounts, and that makes it a worse experience. I deal with a lot of ai generated accounts. Some even blatantly add AI generated profile images of fake people that don't exist. 3. Because of number 2 above, the prevalence of scams and state actors working in intelligence capacities on the website is out of control. Yes I said it, LinkedIn is full of spies and scammers, and AI's run by them, all pretending to be real humans with real jobs to fill. The reason the job market has gotten so bad isn't that people don't want to hire or that companies don't want to continue existing, It's that there is a coordinated supply chain attack going on that is intentionally trying to make it harder for them to hire. The worst part about this is that you can only report people as not real humans so many times per 24 hour period before it stops working. And many of these fake profiles are blatant scams, Literally asking you for your Social Security number to be submitted to a ghost job at a company that I know doesn't really ask for that. We've all seen the posts about scammers following profiles for new jobs and pretending to be the CEO and making requests of the employee, or trying to take advantage of job seekers. That would stop overnight if they simply changed a few simple things to make things more secure. 4. And yeah, I mentioned Tinder earlier so I think it's fair to say that some of the messages that I see sent to women on this website are not professional. I imagine it's probably far worse. If Linkedin is really dedicated to having a professional and safe environment. then I think the ability to do filters and validate identities only serves to help with that and make people feel safe. Just a thought or 2.

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I don't really post but got a bit of annoyed about couple of posts this morning. I will probably get a decent amount of flame for this, but before sharpening your pitchforks, this is a personal opinion, and maybe a wakeup call for some groups of people and / or companies. There is no ill intent or desire to insult anyone (if you feel insulted maybe take a look in the mirror and seriously evaluate if I am right or not). I initially wanted to link a couple of posts as examples but then I realized that the only thing that would achieve is to put those persons in a defensive position and decided against it. Also I am speaking mainly about IT. Other domains have other challenges. So... first type of posts (especially juniors): X days without a job, industry sucks. If this happens there are some possible reasons: - Industry really sucks - You are verry unlucky - You have unrealistic expectations compared to what you bring If industry really sucked there will be no job listings, many other people would have same issues. Unfortunately industry is a bit down overall (peaked in 2022 for a ton of reasons, if there are requests I can make a separate post about those), but is still up compared to 2019, and there are a decent amount of openings (also it is up compared to 2023). So it does suck, but that not much for this to be the main reason. You are unlucky... sorry, can't do anything about this. But if you were unlucky for 200+ days... maybe is not just lack of luck. There is a thing here that is objectively bad, and that is the "gatekeeper bots" (this can be a full separate post). Now about expectations... this may come as a shock for many people, but companies do not exist for you to have a job, they exist to make money (and hopefully to bring something good / useful to society - but realistically that is optional). If after n hundred days and m interviews you didn't secure anything... maybe the problem is you. Either you apply for positions you are underqualified, or you expect some unrealistic benefits. If you bring less money to the company than you are payed, you are not an asset, are a liability (how to evaluate this is a different topic, a different post). So... if you are in the first 2 categories I am sorry, is a hard year. If you are in the last one... maybe stop being an entitled snowflake and start bringing some value (or at least try). Unfortunately in order for you to start bringing value you need to start somewhere. Wasn't it better to have a not so great job for that 200 days and build some sort of portfolio instead of bitching about it? And regardless of the situation one thing is clear: Posting "200+ days without job" only decreases your chances. It tells the employer that you have been denied by everybody else for a long period of time, and puts you in a terrible light from the start. And I hit ln max char limit and didn't get to treat the other type of posts. Should I continue on a different post or I ranted enough? :D

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The policies being driven forward by Thierry Breton around the EU AI Act have been utmost damaging for the European tech industry, and they need to be revised as soon as possible. We need to better balance driving European innovation through data collection and modeling with conflicting needs such as data protection and safety. We need to ensure we can turn these developments into businesses that can be the pillar of the next generation of companies that provide productivity growth in Europe. We have no other choice - either we do this here, or we will have to take over products developed in the US and in China, as it already happened with search engines, cell phones, and social networks. We wouldn't want to let this happen with AI applications in robotics or digital assistants. #euacc #euaiact #aiact

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One of my recent favourite interview questions is to pick a technical term that the candidate has thrown around casually while describing their previous experience; and ask them to describe what that means (or how it works) to someone non-technical. Yesterday I had asked a candidate to explain kafka to me, and another to make me understand monoliths vs microservices. This helps me evaluate three important PM skills (esp Platform PMs) - the ability to abstract out complexity, bring clarity and the ability to communicate it based on the audience. This really tests the candidates mettle in all these three areas. I give them time to compose their ideas and then explain to me. An added bonus is - you will also know if they are just throwing around tech terms without understanding them. If they are truthful and acknowledge this, I give them another chance to pick any technical (or deep expertise) areas on their own.

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Geoffrey Hinton's contributions is significant enough that I won't quibble with the category for his prize. (Nobel committee could create a special category just for him for all I care.) Widely (and rightfully) recognized as a leading expert in deep learning, his research touches everything from * Foundational concepts such as backprop https://lnkd.in/gMunbBzA * Foundational model architectures such as AlexNet https://lnkd.in/gq2JPJ6h * Optimization algorithms such as Momentum and RMSProp * Visualization techniques such as t-SNE https://lnkd.in/gjuw3vhA I don't think it's possible to overstate how profound the impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence will have on society, promising to unlock discoveries, improving productivity. Even ideas about what mastery of language or reasoning means, will need to be re-thought. Professor Hinton deserves all the credit for all of this.

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Conjecture: Given developers of sufficient seasoning, #refactoring “when it feels good” is effectively equivalent to refactoring “to invest company money wisely”. (Developers at every level can be thinking about how well the two are correlated. A good way to acquire seasoning.)

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Yesterday marked ten years since the release of Superintelligence in the UK. When the book was released in 2014, the topic of AI risk and AI safety was often dismissed, and anyone raising concerns about AI was seen as a fearmonger. However, in just ten years, we find ourselves in a completely different world—a world in which the questions of AI risks and AI safety can no longer be ignored. In this post, I aim to evaluate the book's impact over the past decade and its continued relevance in 2024. https://lnkd.in/eDhiqk9K #artificialintelligence #aisafety #superintelligence

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Dear recruiters, I'm genuinely curious about your logic and would love for someone to explain this to me! 1. I put up multiple posts saying I am HIRING Senior and Lead engineers. 2. Recruiter likes my post and messages me privately 3. Said recruiter asks if I would be interested in APPLYING to a junior engineering role. If I'm hiring for leads, and my title it engineering manager, what suggests I would apply to a junior role? Maybe I've set something up wrong in LinkedIn but I am really bored of my inbox being filled by utterly irrelevant messages! Especially when there are so many talented junior engineers not getting the same messages :( #recruiters #jobhunting #hiring #confused

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The 2024 StackOverflow survey is out, and for the 8th year in a row, Clojure has ranked near the podium in the Top Paying Technologies category—often occupying rank 1. I don't talk much about why I choose to use a weird Lisp—mostly because nobody cares—but the results speak for themselves. If you can hold your nose long enough to learn something very different, you'll find yourself in a high-productivity environment that features: 🔥 Hot code reloading 🦆 Dynamic typing ♻️ Best-in-class garbage collection 📂 Highly performant immutable data structures 📚 Access to the entire JVM's ecosystem of libraries 🧩 Cross-platform compilation to JavaScript 🧠 An unbelievably smart and humble community Sure, you'll pay a high mental price to learn the language, but as a reward, employers will pay a high price for *you*.

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This is a very good paper on benchmarking courtesy of Justin Jaffray. We definitely need more practical books and writing on benchmarking practices geared at senior+ developers. https://lnkd.in/enuumUy4

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What a honour to take part in building resources to teach primary school students about AI! 🦾 Well done to the Code for Life team!! Resources are available for all primary teachers and you can find out more below ☺️ Here’s a teaser: https://lnkd.in/eeAvt3C9

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public class Main {    public static void main(String[] args) {        System.out.println("Thank you so much Sir!");    } }

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30 posts and 15k words later - it's been a month trying to keep my new writing habit. If you’re looking for hot ML news, I recommend TheSequence, the Neuron Daily and AlphaSignal. However, if you're interested in understanding challenges (and their solutions) faced by teams building ML products for millions, if you're building or leading such a team, you'll find many relevant topics at https://lnkd.in/gGdW8PYe

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Principal Engineer Staff Engineer Distinguished Engineer (my favourite) I’m going to say it and it’s likely a little rhetorical: I dislike all these terms immensely. Please can someone give me the canonical description for what they are supposed to mean? (I know I can use a search engine or AI to do it… I want to know what people think they mean). The industry I work in is in danger of disappearing up its own backside. What’s wrong with: Software engineer Why do we need to differentiate? The only reason I can see is signposting to people with differing levels of experience or different sets of responsibilities. If we need to do that then, I’m not sure our teams are set up correctly in the first place. #software #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #productdevelopment

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Next week, I will be in #Berlin at LeadDev, speaking about #NeurodiversityInTech which is a topic I care deeply about. I will also attend many other great talks, so I am giving a shoutout to some of the talks I am most excited to see. Ice, confusion, and the 38,000ft crash - Nickolas Means Level up the whole party, not just the hero - Denise Yu How to talk to everyone: Connecting with your reporting chain - Najla Elmachtoub

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