The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast

Is anyone instantly suspicious when they introduce themselves these days an "AI Developer"

> Is anyone instantly suspicious when they introduce themselves these days an "AI Developer"

I'm only suspicious if they don't simultaneously and eagerly show me their Github so that I can see what they've accomplished.

Of the great developers I have worked with in real life, across a large number of projects and workplaces, very few have any Github presence. Most don't even have LinkedIn. They usually don't have any online presence at all: No blog with regular updates. No Twitter presence full of hot takes.

Sometimes this industry is a lot like the "finance" industry: People struggling for credibility talk about it constantly, everywhere. They flex and bloviate and look for surrogates for accomplishments wherever they can be found. Peacocking on github, writing yet another tutorial on what tokens are and how embeddings work, etc.

That obviously doesn't mean in all cases, and there are loads of stellar talents that have a strong online presence. But by itself it is close to meaningless, and my experience is that it is usually a negative indicator.

I think the actual truth is somewhere halfway. Hard to not have any GitHub presence if you use enough open source projects, since you can't even report bugs to many of them without an account.

But if you mostly mean in the sense that they don't have a fancy GitHub profile with a ton of followers... I agree, that does seem to be the case.

LinkedIn on the other hand... I sincerely can't imagine networking on LinkedIn being a fraction as useful as networking... Well, at work. For anyone that has a decent enough resume LinkedIn is basically only useful if you want a gutter trash news feed and to be spammed by dubious job offers 24/7. Could be wrong, but I'm starting to think you should really only stoop to LinkedIn in moments of desperation...

As a hiring manager LinkedIn profiles are a huge window into someone's professional side, just like github may be a huge window into their technical side.

As a candidate I think LinkedIn is absolute trash - and toxic with all the ghost jobs and dark patterns. Feels like everyone else has the same opinion, or at the very least it is a common one. But when I have 50 candidates to review for 5 open positions, LinkedIn is going to give me great insight that I cannot really get anywhere else. I keep my profile current in the hopes that I'm not doing it for LinkedIn, but for the person researching me to see if I am a valid candidate for their role.