u/Tree8282

So recently there’s been more Mainland MTV (meiktv, 星聚會）brands that are coming into Hong Kong and they are insanely expensive and feels extortionate.

Naturally you’d think they’d at least match their relative prices in mainland, or undercut the HK peers like what JD and keeta does. But they decided to go the other way and charge 500-1000 per person with a COVER charge. FYI that’s like 2x the price of RedMr/Neway, and the service and quality isn’t any different from RedMr or Neway, maybe just slightly newer furniture.

I just find it ridiculous because it’s becoming an eyesore in Central/LKF. And it makes no sense bc the influx of new immigrants are working class and won’t be able to afford that?

Basically the title. Current role is kinda like a PhD Intern at a big tech. Working on the same projects as FTE but not leading or given full autonomy on project direction. Kinda stumped bc the current work is great but I don’t have a PhD and i’m not leading any projects. just wanna actually be a staff eventually but that does seem like a really steep hill to climb.

Anyone can give any advice? Is grinding out leetcode and system design basically still the only way? Do i need to push for more coauthors ?

Let’s say i’m a junior research engineer at google brain. If I wanna transition to quant, would there be roles with transferable skills?

Where i’m at, Research engineering is essentially doing the engineering for the research scientists, mainly building python systems, distributed system, and large scale ML infrastructure.

To my knowledge, Quant researcher is pure research, while many quant developer roles are pure software engineering/C++, so research engineers don’t really fit either . Would there be quant roles suitable for transitioning? Like would there be many systems engineer or research engineer related roles?

With AI, there’s been a need for a lot more compute, and intel/ Micron’s stock price soaring like crazy, why doesn’t IBM try to pivot to general purpose/consumer chips as well?

IBM allegedly has some of the best chips in its mainframe and other hardware, why wouldn’t they want to tweak those for general purpose processing and compete with intel/AMD?

Like even Google has TPUs, Meta has MTIA, Apple has silicon, IBM already has some of the best guys at this and they’re not taking advantage of those massive need for compute

So im working as a researcher (3yoe) outside of UK, but considering going back to London because there’s so much more opportunities especially with the Google, Anthropic, Openai expansion there. I don’t need a visa sponsorship

I see half the posts in UK subs saying junior is basically impossible with 300+ apps, while on the news almost every AI company is expanding in London.

So what’s the reality, should i spend my time looking for a job here, or is it genuinely as difficult as people say?

Also i’m a BNO holder (eligibility for 5 year visa into PR), how would you view this and would it affect my job search?

EDIT: the software engineering side of my company is better than this, i’m only talking about the AI lab.

I’m in a big tech AI lab. They hired a bunch of vibe code juniors to help with model development and they’re so clueless.

the company as a whole encourages vibe coding, but i think it is much more applicable to the seniors who write amazing code to have AI assistance. While the juniors have no clue what’s going on, not having any idea what their code does and often giving me wrong information about what they’re doing. an example is requesting one node (8 gpus) per model when they can request 1 gpu per model essentially wasting 8x compute. If the company actually keeps track, they’re losing thousands per day on this. It’s insane how these people are hired and encouraged to vibe when they clearly don’t know good coding practices. This is a really big AI lab btw.