The Boasters in Tech Companies

Introduction

I have worked in academia and industry for more than ten years, and I have noticed two facts:

1. The more intelligent and knowledgeable a person is, the more humble and honest the person is.
2. The true intelligent and knowledgeable person usually only posts positive and educative speeches publicly, if there is any, but never hatred and proactive speeches without widely accepted evidences or facts.

However, many companies, especially startup companies, that I often countered from social media and advertisements are full of bullshit boasts, such as the resume of their founding members. When a company or a research institute has many of such boasters or braggarts, one would not trust it and its products and we should always stay away from it.

Examples

Here are a few examples that I collected about the boaster or liar people and their companies. I might add more such examples from time to time in the future.

An Online Software Engineering Education Startup Company

There is a company which claimed it is the “Online Stanford University” and has paid a significant amount of money on YouTube advertising their “free” online masterclass recently.

One of the company founders claimed that he is a former tech lead and has interviewed more than 300 candidates when he worked at Facebook. When I checked his resume, I found that he claimed he was a tech lead immediately upon his join at Facebook. But it was only 10 months after he got his undergraduate degree. Nowadays, the engineering projects are complicated and people are collaborating with each other heavily, claiming someone is a tech lead insults the other people. Therefore, intelligent, humble, and friendly engineers, especially when they are not senior enough, hardly claim they are tech leads.

He only worked at Facebook for four years before he co-founded this online education company, yet he claimed he had interviewed more than 300 candidates, despite he was too junior to be capable of interviewing engineers. On average, that would be 6.25 candidates per month during his stay at Facebook. You would not expect he would hire any truly intelligent engineers from those interviews. You would not also expect he could contribute anything significant or meaningful to Facebook.

There is no doubt that he is a liar and we should also question the resume of other founding members of the company.

An AI Healthcare Startup Company

One of the founding members of this company, although he has never worked for Facebook, is somehow one of the authors of the PyTorch whitepaper which has been cited more than ten thousand times so far. He claimed that he is the coauthor of PyTorch and has contributed a significant amount to PyTorch. He’s very active on social media, such as Twitter, boasting the work he and his team has done and depreciating the work other people have been doing, with his naive opinions and shallow understandings. What’s surprising is he still got a few thousand followers.

When I checked his GitHub profile, he has only contributed no more than 200 lines of code to the PyTorch library and a few simple PyTorch tutorials in his entire GitHub lifetime. This is definitely not qualified for a PyTorch coauthor and a major PyTorch contributor. He has fooled so many people and hurt lots of good projects other people have worked hard on.

Conclusions

Because of my personal experiences and career, I am extremely sensitive to these boasts and even frauds in academia and industry, much more sensitive than most of the other people. Do not trust people’s profiles and be biased by their speeches easily. Think and judge on your own.