The offers were all over the shop. Some places downleveled me to mid level while others upleveled me. The comp range was about 3x between the lowest and the highest.

Also I couldn't find much of a pattern on the processes and outcomes. No name companies rejected my application without even a phone screen. Lower tier companies offered me lower levels while famously hard to crack ones offered me higher levels. I also didn't see much correlation on how hard interviews were.

I'm totally convinced the job market is a numbers game and there is a high degree of randomness and luck involved. Discipline and hard work help, but outcomes are far from guaranteed. Last time I almost didn't leave my job since most offers were worse than my then current one, until I got 2 high quality offers at the end.

I have only skimmed through the article but I'm impressed OP got a job as a Research Engineer with no formal background, given that I got doors slammed even after PhD + years of relevant experience. I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, but I would be very wary of anecdata and formulas for success. OP quit his job and focused 100% on the search, and it paid off. I know many more similar stories that didn't pan out, and people had to rush to get lower quality jobs or, in the worst cases, got into long term unemployment.

Just my 2 cents.

> Mistral AI SAS (French: [mistʁal]) is a French artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in Paris.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_AI

I'm not sure why "lab" is being used for all of these companies in this space. Is it an attempt to sweep their money motivations under the rug, or something else?

you can also research about youtube-dl/yt-dlp (and using an ad blocker)

This is the equivalent of me saying, if you want to join me researching quantum computing. You need to learn about the quantum and then the computing. Broadly at first then choose a niche.

It's a bit, well obviously.