Tag Archives: Personal

Anything personal that might not necessarily be tech related

Beyond the Resume: Speculative Hiring Trends in an AI World

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I was recently at a conference where I started chatting with a computer science graduate about job hunting in the world today. We discussed the job market landscape as it exists today and all of the economic influences, disruptive technology (cough, AI, cough), and competition out there.

Old School Cell Phone

When I first jumped into my first professional job out of college, the world was entirely a different place. Social media was still an infant, we were rapidly approaching the dot-com bubble, and we were a few years away from (real) smartphones becoming available. In this conversation, I reflected on what challenges I faced then and wondered how I would react to the demands and problems faced in the current technology climate.

Having been on both sides of the aisle when it comes to the interview process as an interviewee and building one of the best teams as an interviewer, I thought it might be good to share the conversation I had and also expand on it a little further having had a little more time to think about it. Let’s dive into it…

How LinkedIn Connects Candidates to Employers

LinkedIn has become the go-to platform for recruiters seeking top talent, but it’s evolving beyond a simple job board. The platform has adjusted its algorithm to prioritize actively engaged candidates – those who post updates, comment on other people’s posts, and interact with their network. Simply having a profile and being logged in isn’t enough anymore. Recruiters want to connect with individuals who use the platform daily in the event an opportunity finds its way into your inbox, and, second, that you demonstrate interest and expertise in their field through their activity.

Look at this from the recruiter’s and LinkedIn’s point of view. If you are paying buckets of cash for LinkedIn Hire to find a candidate for an open position, you, as a recruiter, ideally want a response to each message sent. Also, LinkedIn doesn’t want to connect individuals to a recruiter who might not respond. This is the summary of the interaction right here… full stop. This shift means job seekers need to rethink their approach.

Be Active On Social Media

Staying visible requires active participation, from sharing industry insights to engaging with thought leaders. Those who embrace this shift can significantly increase their chances of being noticed and approached for opportunities. In contrast, passive candidates who only update their profiles when job hunting may find themselves overlooked. Being “active” on any job platform (especially LinkedIn) usually means you will reply to an inquiry for an open job.

AI Will Kill the Resume

The rise of AI tools has transformed the job application process, making it easier than ever for candidates to create tailored resumes that align perfectly with job descriptions. Tools like ChatGPT can generate highly customized resumes that match job listings with striking accuracy. I haven’t done this myself because I am very selective of the positions that I am seeking. Still, as someone more open to different types of work, using a prompt that mashes your resume and the job description together, I am guessing it might put you at the top of the list.

Be Active On Social Media

However, this has created a significant challenge for recruiters… many candidates look great on paper but lack the actual skills needed for the job. This trend has led to an increase in candidates getting through the initial screening, only to falter during technical interviews or practical assessments. I see a lot of chatter on subreddits where it’s been very difficult to land a job, let alone get a call back after the first interview. As AI-driven resume generation becomes more common, companies will need to adopt new strategies to verify a candidate’s true abilities before moving forward in the hiring process.

As someone who has helped build teams, it’s VERY time consuming hiring people. The time spent on the interview process is time spent away from doing my actual day-to-day tasks; unfortunately, that work doesn’t stop just because I am interviewing candidates. Even back then, I was very selective about the individuals who got an email for an interview.

How Do You Prove Competence?

With AI making it easier to “embellish” resumes, the challenge for employers is determining whether a candidate truly possesses the skills they claim. Just as students can use AI to complete homework without fully understanding the material, job seekers can list expertise they don’t genuinely have or may just have passing knowledge in. This presents a costly dilemma for businesses… how do they identify qualified individuals without wasting resources on lengthy interview processes?

Be Active On Social Media

Organizations are adopting different screening mechanisms, such as skill assessments, project-based evaluations, and real-world problem-solving tests. Conducting multiple rounds of interviews can be expensive and inefficient, so refining the process to quickly filter out candidates that may not be a good match is crucial to maintaining productivity and hiring success. I think we are in the middle of this shift right now.

Having said that, I hope this isn’t a new era of “Interview 2.0” questions because you know… all software engineers need to be able to tell you how to get 4 gallons of water using only a 3 and 5-gallon jug or to estimate the number of trees in Central Park. Although, I would rather do that than have a week-long programming assignment to prove I know how to program. Trust me, I have declined many of those because it’s like I have an infinite amount of time in my day and love doing work for free.

Public Speaking and Open Source May Hold the Answer

So what do we do about this particular problem?

To address the challenge of validating skills without extensive in-person interviews, companies/interviewers may want to turn to alternative proof of competencies, such as public speaking engagements and, for the tech world, their open-source contributions. Reviewing a candidate’s GitHub activity, technical blog posts, or recorded presentations can provide valuable insights into their expertise and problem-solving abilities.

GitHub Contributions

Although I never really looked at user content 7-10 years ago, I did look at GitHub and open source contributions on other platforms. With AI being able to generate code in any language these days, there is something to be said about supporting a product or an open source project. When a user/customer reports an issue, the project maintainer must triage, root cause the problem, and interact with another human being. This speaks volumes.

GitHub Contributions

Similarly, public speaking appearances or videos posted on social media platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, at industry events or webinars allow recruiters to see how well candidates can articulate complex concepts. At the end of presentations, there is inevitably a Q&A session where they aren’t going to be able to use ChatGPT to answer a question live in-person. These in-person examples or recorded sessions provide a more authentic measure of skill and commitment than a polished resume ever could.

The Full Stop Thought

So, where do we go from here? We are seeing some of these changes happen in recruiting today. I have heard of interviews where a link kicks off a recorded session, and you, as the interviewer, are presented with questions to answer on video for review later. I don’t know how effective this is, but I have heard of this happening. Is this a good solution? It sounds horrible if you ask me, but change is happening.

As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, the challenges in hiring today are interesting and unique, to say the least. However, there is something to be said for verifiable contributions, like GitHub or posted videos. As someone who thinks social media has done a number on society and who only has socials for work-related purposes only, I came to one possible answer… this content can provide a window into someone’s vested interest in topics they chose and how they demonstrate understanding of that topic.

Until next time!

Will AI Replace Mid-Level Engineers by 2025? Not So Fast, Mark Zuckerberg

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It’s hard to ignore the growing buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential impact on various industries. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg predicted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that AI could replace mid-level engineers by 2025. While it’s a compelling narrative, it misses the mark for several reasons. Let’s unpack why this prediction is more hype than reality.

Companies Aren’t Fully Using Their Own AI Tools

Take Salesforce as a prime example. The company has heavily promoted its AI-powered sales agents, touting them as the future of sales. Yet, if you look at Salesforce’s own career page, approximately 75% of their job postings (775 out of 1035 as of Jan 16, 2025) are for sales roles. If their AI tools were truly ready to replace human salespeople, why wouldn’t Salesforce “dogfood” their own product, slash sales jobs, and reap massive savings?

Dogfooding Gone Wrong

This disconnect isn’t unique to Salesforce. Many companies pushing AI solutions still rely heavily on human expertise to deliver the results they promise. It’s one thing to sell the dream of AI-driven automation, but it’s another to trust your core operations to it. If organizations like Salesforce, which stand to gain the most from successful AI adoption, aren’t betting the farm on their own tools, why should we believe AI will displace engineers en masse at other companies?

AI-Generated Code Still Needs Maintenance

Even if AI can write functional code, that doesn’t eliminate the need for mid-level engineers. All code, no matter how well-written, eventually requires updates. Security vulnerabilities need patching, APIs evolve, dependencies get deprecated, and business requirements change. Who’s going to handle these inevitable maintenance tasks? AI might be able to assist, but it can’t completely replace the nuanced understanding of a system that a human engineer provides.

Consider the metaphor of AI as a power tool for software development. It can make some tasks faster and easier, but someone still needs to wield the tool, know how to use it safely, and fix the mess when something goes wrong. Far from making engineers obsolete, AI tools are likely to amplify their productivity—and perhaps even increase demand for engineers who can effectively integrate these tools into their workflows.

AI Generated Code

If companies like Meta actually moved forward with replacing most of their mid-level engineers, they’d quickly find themselves in a “foot-and-gun” scenario. Without a robust team of engineers to maintain and adapt AI-generated code, systems would break down, product development would stall, and customer trust would erode. It’s a short-sighted strategy that prioritizes immediate cost savings over long-term resilience.

Selling the Promise of AI Is in Their Interest

It’s no secret that tech giants have a vested interest in promoting AI as the next big thing. AI and machine learning are lucrative business lines, and hyping up their potential is a great way to attract investment, sell products, and capture headlines. By framing AI as a technology capable of replacing entire swaths of the workforce, these companies generate excitement and urgency around adopting their solutions.

Heck, I am an AI/ML Engineer… I am in the space promoting the same thing, but my views on AI/ML is that they are HIGHLY strategic tools to be used by people. Replacing mid-level engineers isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a strategic one. Engineering teams don’t just write code—they collaborate, solve complex problems, and adapt systems to changing business needs. These human-centric tasks are not easily outsourced to AI, no matter how advanced it becomes.

AI Generated Code

At the end of the day, humans consume the products that these companies produce. Until that changes, people will make the decision on what to buy and companies need to persuade those people to choose to buy their products. AI/ML systems don’t understand why things go viral, why we collectively like what we do, and why things like Hawk Tuah or Luigi Mangione captured our collective attention. Would AI have predicted that a good number of people would rally around someone killing another person? I think not.

The Full Stop Thought

AI is undoubtedly transforming how we work, and some jobs will inevitably be impacted. However, the idea that AI will replace most mid-level engineers at companies like Meta by 2025 is far-fetched. The reality is that AI tools are most effective as complements to human expertise, not replacements for it. Companies still need skilled engineers to maintain systems, adapt to changes, and ensure the quality of their products—and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Here is the final thought… Currently, all AI systems today start with a user prompt. The keyword here is the user. Humans drive the direction of the work an AI system does because they aren’t self-aware of their environment. They don’t know what’s happening outside the digital world and the little box they live in. Until AI systems interfaces become a simple power switch without requiring a user prompt, these systems will need humans to direct what they produce. Period.

Pushing the Boundaries: My Experience at the Real Time Communication Conference at Illinois Institute of Technology

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This was my first time at the RTC Conference at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and I was blown away by the caliber of talks at the event. They ranged from very academic and theoretical to extremely practical, capturing what is happening on the ground today in real-time communications. The mix of attendees was one of the most diverse I have ever seen, which included seasoned professionals in their respective fields to bright and inquisitive minds from IIT starting their careers in the workforce. I was fortunate to have some fantastic conversations while I was here, which I will get to at the end of this post, but this was a mind-opening experience that I am grateful to have received.

RTC Conference at Illinois Institute of Technology

My journey to Chicago included presenting two sessions at the conference. The first was titled “Enhancing Real-Time WebRTC Conversation Understanding Using ChatGPT” and the second was “Edge Devices as Interactive Personal Assistants: Unleashing the Power of Generative AI Agents”. The talks each had very different goals in what they were trying to achieve. Based on the feedback and number of questions that I got afterward in the hallway, they were very well received. Attendees got a glimpse into some unique and thought-provoking possibilities they could take home to explore.

Enhancing Real-Time WebRTC Conversation Understanding Using ChatGPT

The upshot of this session was using Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to influence conversations in real time. The backdrop was using WebRTC as a protocol and platform to host our conversation, but in reality, any medium conducive to carrying a conversation would suffice. However, WebRTC provides an ideal environment as it’s an open standard, and every modern browser has the capability of supporting these voice/video communications.

Large Language Models and Conversation AIs, like ChatGPT, for the first time, have enabled us to influence the conversation on these platforms because they seamlessly participate in conversations and provide relevant contributions to the conversations being had. That’s the key to why this is a “thing” today. These AIs can be proactive in conversation and not just react to them.

If you are interested in learning more and seeing a really cool demo showcasing this in action, look at the recording above. The demo was definitely a crowd-pleaser since we got to highlight two powerful concepts: AI can retain the history of the conversation taking place and meaningfully participate to influence the simulated conversation for the demo.

All of these resources, links to articles mentioned, and open source projects used in this presentation can be found in the slides. There are also instructions on how to reproduce the demo within this talk.

Edge Devices as Interactive Personal Assistants: Unleashing the Power of Generative AI Agents

My second session focused on Autonomous AI Agents. This might be an unfamiliar topic to some, but we have all heard about them interacting in the real world. Unlike Siri and Alexa, which focus on a single transactional question and response, these are processes where AI models can create their own sub-tasks for problems that need more refinement or detail that a single answer might not be able to answer sufficiently. Without these Autonomous Agents, we typically achieve this refinement by asking the AI ourselves to drill down into a problem further. In this case, the autonomous agent process provides its own questions to seek out the details of the answer.

Since these LLMs are getting smarter and consume fewer resources than previous generations, they can live on IoT (Internet of Things) and Edge devices for the first time thanks to devices getting denser with more hardware capabilities and resources. This talk focuses on different architectures that can be used to land these Autonomous Agents on these IoT/Edge devices to focus on jobs that could run for many minutes to multiple days. The trade-off in these cases is answers with concentrated amounts of knowledge and a more thorough response versus the speed of the reply.

Take a look at the recording of the session above. There is also a demo at the end of this presentation that serves as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate what could be done with these Autonomous AI Agents using an open source project I wrote called Open Virtual Assistant. The demo highlights exercising the “memory” for these Agents (via their vector database) and how one might launch these agents within an IoT or Edge device.

Again all of these resources, links to articles mentioned, and open source projects used in this presentation can be found in the slides with instructions on reproducing the demo within this talk.

Looking Back… Personal Reflections

My most memorable parts of the conference were the conversations with other attendees. The last time I attended a conference was in the second half of 2022, just before ChatGPT blew up in the media. Oh, how times have changed! Besides a good number of the talks focusing on ChatGPT or AI in general, the buzz was definitely in the air and dominated most of the chatter in the hallways. I love tech talk, but I might love these philosophical, what-if, and future-predicting conversations even more.

One of the top questions I get asked frequently as someone who works in the AI/ML is, “Will humans lose our jobs to AI?”. I was also asked this while at the conference. My response is always yes and no. Yes, certain jobs will likely become obsolete… and No, there will always be jobs out there since we haven’t solved all the problems contained within our existence. There will always be jobs, but they might look completely different from what they are today.

An example I always like to give is the calculator and personal computer. When the calculator became mainstream, did all accounting or anything related to math disappear? The answer is definitely No. Society then created far more advanced “calculators” in the form of personal computers that do a bunch of repetitive tasks and naturally transitioned into automation. This is the automation of building cars, canning foods, or mass-producing clothing or shoes. This automation obsoleted people canning foods but created new jobs to develop and maintain these new automation systems.

Everyone recognizes the potential for Artificial Intelligence as the next significant disruptor to humanity. My advice is that just like the calculator or computer, it’s best to understand and know how to use these systems regardless of your field. Those who know how to leverage AI will outshine those who don’t. Finally, when there isn’t a need for a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, it’s best to objectively recognize the change in tides and learn something new to transition to. That’s my long-winded answer.

Meeting New Friends

I had a great time at RTC Conference at IIT, and if you are a person like me who loves to learn new and exciting topics, technologies, and ideas, then this is a great place to expand your mind. I highly recommend going and hope I am lucky enough to be working on something compelling enough to share with others next year. Cheers!