Are there books that teach people about the sorts of systems used to make animated movies? I’ve seen game engine books and the like. Physically based rendering is on my list, but I wonder if there are other interesting reads I’m missing.
Yes, classic book where from 90's like "The Renderman Companion" or "Advanced RenderMan", and then there is toolings books, for each tool. I used to own many Maya books and 3DS Max books.
I also think that people here are missing the game that was played by the VCs. I have a friend working at Insight who told me that they were preparing to issue loans and further funding to portfolio companies. This of course is less ideal than having the government bail their portfolio out, but they would have had no choice. So, having shot themselves in the foot by starting a panic, they decided that the best way to avoid getting in trouble was to push the panic even further to the point that it threatened the entire economic system.
Personally, that is what I find so disgusting and that is the source of my animosity. I believe the fed ultimately chose to maximize the probability of avoiding a crisis over punishing these morons. I think that is wise but still not good.
The analogy I choose is this. Imagine there is a forest that is due for a bit of a natural fire. We should let it burn - but wait it turns out some people built and sold houses in this forest. Instead of evacuating and having these people suffer and need to relocate, we put out the fire. Since we put out this fire, these people living in a hazardous way continue to do so. Eventually a massive fire will start and kill those people and spread to other areas that it otherwise would not have. All because we decided to stop the “maintenance” fire from clearing the brush.
99.9% of the reason I am considering the masters is because I figure it fills a gap in my resume and makes me eligible to far more internships.
I don't really want to do data science. I sort've drifted towards it because my major was computational math and it was such a hot field (still is).
I don't think that I missed that job because of the pay or experience on my resume. I had a bit of an anxiety attack during my final interview of the onsite. It isn't the first company I lost out on due to last second freeze ups either sadly.
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that I carry on working on side projects and applying to jobs. I am fortunate enough to be able to survive doing this, but my feeling is that the longer I remain the fewer callbacks I will get due to the gap. Do you disagree or is there some way I can mitigate that effect?
If you’re worried about a gap in your resume, then everybody has that problem. The reason for the hiring crisis is that the A/T/S software that companies use filters people out who have a gap, and everybody has a gap. Maybe you can look online for ways to format your resume to pass through the A/T/S software? My point is that there’s easier ways to deal with that then going to get your Masters.
You’re totally right! I’m in NY. For a while I was looking only for work here, but as of a few weeks ago I’m aiming for any city. I’m an Italian citizen so I could even go to Europe hahaha. Thank you for the optimism about my position. I’m wondering how you would suggest meeting more people at companies that interest me? LinkedIn? I wasn’t a CS major so all but one of my school friends are nowhere near these industries.
I should have clarified. I do not consider my rate of getting interviews to be reasonably successful lol.
At first, I was very unsure of what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time applying to really competitive software/quant jobs at finance firms. I mainly did this because I felt pressure to come home (NY).
I then wasted a lot of time applying to data science roles with experience requirements that were out of my range. I am good at Python, SQL, feature engineering, and stats for an undergrad (I think), but these jobs all wanted 2+ YOE. I thought that I might make it with my math background. I was also panicking about the lack of entry level positions I was seeing. I had a terrible go of it and it really shot my confidence. I had the two onsites during this period.
Now there are more entry level positions and I've been applying for lots of data/software engineering positions. I've applied to maybe 20 places in the past month and gotten 3 interviews. All 3 are at companies that a few months ago I thought had zero interest in me.
I am also about to start searching outside of my home city (NY) because that was a stupid constraint to put on myself in the first place.
I do worry that my resume is not as strong as others due to only having one internship and projects. I've been working on a few projects to jazz things up, but progress is slow because I have this terrible excel job at the moment. I was thinking a bootcamp would be a good way to work on projects with less of a gap on the resume. That is probably the wrong reason to go for one because it is mainly about the optics...
There are two paths to getting a quant job in finance: (1) prove you can make money trading, (2) have connections.
I am in Ithaca and make it to NYC from time to attend free conferences of various sorts, some put on by vendors (Sun Microsystems, AWS) and others put on by industry associations (say American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) also there are all sorts of meetups.
Tell the guy pitching a system that it's not quite the bee's knees for main memory databases in 2005 and you might get a business card pushed into your hand from somebody who works at a really famous hedge fund.
If I were in NYC I would be going to those kind of events as much as I could and I'd be dressed as a goth corporate raider/vampire. To stick out at that kind of event takes a mindset similar to the person who "makes money trading" in that you need to be 90 degrees out of phase in the leading direction.
"Having a connection" thus works in a different modes, one of which is "I am a bright and bushy tailed ivy leaguer who was on the rowing team", another one is that you find out about opportunities before other people do, know the people who make the collection management software used at the Met, etc. That last one might take 6-18 months to pay off but it pays off handsomely.
Unless you really don't like NYC for some reason I wouldn't leave it.
I think most of the "data scientists" and organizations that employ data scientists are poseurs. I blew a really good opportunity because I didn't have the courage to say: you're going to have to make a big investment in building a training set which matches the business problem you're trying to solve. Instead I went ahead and did the same things that couldn't possibly work that everybody else did.
There is nothing like a good demo, my experience is that every side project I start and stick to seriously changes my life somehow in about 18 months.
Looking at your last round of job hunting I would say you should be focused equally on resume and interview, I would point you to this guy
I have an mITX setup and the card was overheating under load. I took off the shroud and backplate. I then got the artic accelero kit and installed the mini heatsinks and big heat sink. With the fans from the kit, it wouldn’t fit. So, I put two noctuas underneath the card. Now the card idles at whatever the room temperature is. It is quiet as a mouse because of the noctuas. I’ve only seen it touch 90c one time and that was while training a resnet over the course of 3 days.
I’m no expert on hardware. However, is it possible in the future that our progress towards faster and faster chips slows to the point where a 30 yr old chip is actually not that slow compared to a modern chip?
