anti-cv
Growing up I didn't want to do anything specific. When I was 10 I wrote a future letter to myself which mentioned "be in a position where you can do whatever you want", I don't think I am there yet...
My first job was being a real estate agent at 15: Besides being held at gunpoint point-blank once, it was a fun experience. It was a small office and so I was given lots of responsibilities :D I did this on and off part/temp-time until 18yo.
I had a second job at 17 doing admin at McD's office. During my interview I mentioned that the admin work could be "trivially automated with modern NLP" (this was before transformers were invented). I knew this as during the slow times of being an estate agent, I was researching machine learning, playing around with text classification in python and writing neural networks from scratch in (cries inside) Java. I just did the admin work though, this department ended up being outsourced, I was made redundant :(
During my computer science degree I worked part-time as a shoe salesman at a busy location. Residents, office workers and tourists were the main customers, both men and women. In retrospect, it ended up being a great learning experience due to the frequency of customers that we were trying to provide a good personal service to. At this time I was still unsure about what I wanted from my career, it wasn't something I deeply thought about besides having generic headings in my mind like software engineering, researching ML and prop-trading.
A friend mentioned the software-engineering consultancy he would be interning at were looking for another intern, so after a referral they offered me an interview :) During the internship (note: a few years before chatGPT), the team were building what we would now call a "chatGPT wrapper" chatbot.
During my third year of uni I was in "researcher mode", I became super interested in machine learning. I thought this would be my career path, so I even felt ambitious enough to apply to cambridge for a computer science masters which I was accepted onto but later turned down. My day revolved around reading Arxiv and implementing ideas in pytorch which was so fun. I wished I could be like Lucidrains.
I continued researcher mode for my next year of study but also joined a startup where I was (1) building infra for trading "non-standard" financial markets as well as (2) building a b2b saas app. (1) was pretty cool.
After university I joined a tech company, mostly working on making tools for software engineers. Was this a fatal mistake? Find out next time...
notable failures:
- I tried to become an artist, it's not about the money but I did sell around $100 worth of art. I don't practice anymore.
- I tried to get into Nanosystems (Molecular machinery) but skill issue.