news.ycombinator.com• Jun 28, 2024• 1 min read
Ask HN: Bottom Up ML Development at FAANG?I’ve worked as a Data Science/ML Engineer for 12 years. I’ve worked for 2 “boring” Enterprise Software companies most people haven’t heard of, and 2 non-tech commercial hardware product (e.g. HVAC systems) companies. In all my jobs, my work has been defined by the “business.” It’s a typical top-down approach, with the business or stakeholders proposing all the use cases and the business value. Our job is to explore feasibility of these use cases and build something.I recently interviewed for an SWE-Machine Learning role at a FAANG company. I asked the interviewer how they worked with the business to come up with use cases, and they said they (the SWEs) came up with the use cases, not a business stakeholder. SWEs typically came up with ideas, wrote a proposal (design document??), and things went from there, all to way to finding the people to build it and test it. It was a very bottom-up approach. When I asked them how they worked with the business side of things to determine the value