Research vs Engineering
Elon's repost
It starts from a repost by Elon:
This false nomenclature of “researcher” and “engineer”, which is a thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system, is being deleted from @xAI today.
There are only engineers.
Researcher is a relic term from academia.
Can't agree more.
Debate
People are debating this tweet, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, is one of them.
and
Sorry, but I have to agree with Elon, no engineers are being evaluated based on "'pull requests' or 'lines of code'."
I feel we shouldn’t draw a hard line between software engineering and research work, in today’s world, anyone can take on a wide range of roles. One concern I’ve noticed is that some so called "researcher"s aren’t interested in, or even refuse to use, advanced tools despite their widespread adoption. For example, one applied scientist I worked with told me he doesn’t use Docker. This is exactly the kind of the "pretentious" situation Elon mentioned in his tweet, and something we should stand against.
LLM era's seniority, leveling, and authority
This also happened recently: Meta appointed Shengjia Zhao—who graduated just three years ago—as the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. It's the same role title held by Yann LeCun, putting him in an awkward position where he had to publish a post to clarify things. Meanwhile, Meta continues to offer large compensation packages to individuals and experts in the LLM space. LLMs are rapidly and disruptively changing the world. It reflects that corporate tenure, seniority, leveling, and authority are being redefined in the LLM era.
Meta might be an extreme case, but some groups are still staying calm, for example, Andrew Tulloch from Thinking Machines Lab (a lab co-founded by Lilian Weng, former VP of Research at Open AI.
Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann also mentioned on Lenny’s Podcast that he isn’t too concerned about this recruiting battle with Meta.
My Take
I have experience in both academia and industry. During school, I was an independent researcher in the lab of an IEEE Fellow. Later, I also played both roles in my professional work. In my view, an engineer is fundamentally a problem solver.
At Amazon, there’s a concept called the “Builder.” We have resources like The Amazon Builders’ Library and events such as Builder’s Day. Regardless of your role, whether you’re an SDE (Software Development Engineer, or as we sometimes say, “Someone Doing Everything”), MLE, Research Engineer, Applied Scientist, Research Scientist, or Product Manager, you are considered a builder delivering products.
Especially in the era of LLMs, the popular idea of "a one-person company" has gained traction. As I mentioned in another blog post, "..a new working model where Product, Engineering, and Research collaborate more closely than ever before". In the new era, everyone can be a product manager, researcher, engineer, or marketer, and the boundaries between professions will become increasingly blurred.
