yanilkr

I was watching this youtube video titled, “Google and Amazon are in the oil business”

https://youtu.be/v3n8txX3144

What bothered me was this casual use of AI and Machine learning to describe “magic” that achieves “magical results”. Deep learning was spared here luckily.

I cannot tell if this fictional description of AI capabilities are a result of ignorance or a very clever content marketing technique to extract money out of oil and energy companies.

If you are an aspiring executive at an energy company, this video is so convincing, you would have to immediately call one of these big tech companies and give them your data and your money. If you have doubts about this, your entire team thinks you are outdated because they all watched the video and read great things about AI.

As a person in technology, I find it challenging to explain the AI hype to non technical people. Even among technical people, I run into young aspiring programmers who name drops a cool AI technique or machine learning technique and are not happy that they do not get to use them at work.

Someone please explain how to make sense of this whole thing?

A recent conversation here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16022916

and backlash for calling it "effective nonsense" prompted me to research and what I found is important to highlight a sort of moral decay in tech community.

First read the sales letter here.

https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book

or here https://archive.is/piyAi

It makes bold claims about revealing secrets of being an effective engineer like the mythical 10X engineer.

I looked up the author to see what sort of experience he/she has to make such claims.

Author's resume

https://angel.co/edmondlau

Things I noticed. This person has not stayed at any company for more than 3 years at a time. No strong engineering role titles like architecture or software design or scaling. Mostly very soft engineering roles like testing and growth hacking. What sort of serious engineering product can one build in that time period at a company with that roles and how many? In many respectable companies I worked for, a person with this experience level cannot even hire/fire people. Interviewing is not same as hiring.

What kind of insights can one expect for this author to have developed that qualifies him to guide engineers to be 10X engineers and or shipping engineered products?

Next look at the the github profile vs quora profile.

https://github.com/edmondlau

https://www.quora.com/profile/Edmond-Lau

This person has more of a content writer(over 500 Quora Q&A) profile compared to code writer profile. There is nothing wrong with it and one might give a pass about not enough coding because not everyone has their code on github but don't you think for someone professing to make you a 10X engineer has at least some open source contributions?.

What sort of engineering skills and expertise do you notice about the author ....

For the rest of this story please read here

http://telegra.ph/Effectiveengineercom-is-content-marketing-fakenews-12-30