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...

coding since the ‘90’s - do not have a github account at all that I ever used for anything. of the top say 10 people I have ever worked with not a single one has a github account.

there is an entire industry of devs who work on meaningful projects, independently or for an employer who solve amazing problems and do amazing sh*t none of which is public or will ever be public.

I have signed more NDAs in my career than I have commits in public repos :)

In the same boat, the problem is you get stuck in a few companies due to the small circles of people who know what you can really do. It really limits your career options. Doesn’t matter if you regularly do in a week what a few hundred engineers cannot do in a year if no one knows it. Your get stuck in a big corp as they will pay you just enough to keep, nothing close to your worth as with no brand your not going to find better anywhere else