Thoughts on Taiwan Tech Summit 24

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Taiwan Tech Summit 2024 took place in Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. It’s an annual conference in which many Taiwanese companies, big and small, gather to discuss the latest trends, hold panels on popular topics, and shared their knowledge.

While it was not the biggest conference one would attend in a calendar year, one aspect to count on is the generous and kind atmosphere provided by many Taiwanese volunteers for the event. The attendees were mostly Asians in their young professional careers; some were still students.

Here are my initial thoughts.

1. Level is important to the audience
   People here care a lot about the job title, especially when the speakers are from Google. I get it, it’s a validation to some extent, but one cannot constitute his or her worth by external validation alone. Maybe this is something that will come with age.
   

2. The manufacturing mentality
   When you attended a panel with speakers from both Google and Nvidia, you could tell the difference between someone from the Software industry vs. someone from the Hardware manufacturing industry. I am not saying one is more important than the other, but the mindset was drastically different. To be specific, the managers from hardware offered top-down advice focusing on performance in a didactic manner. The software managers would try to relate to the audience via some self-deprecating humor. Taiwan has traditionally focused on semiconductor fabrication i.e. TSMC, and that has been the envy of the world. I wonder if that culture could still translate once the person has been transplanted to the US.
   

3. Rekindle those who are driven
   For some coincidental reasons, some Taiwanese I have encountered in the past, who all happened to be female, have risen dramatically in their career path in the past decade. Of course, their rises were not coincidental. Even back then, those with ambition and capability caught my eye; otherwise, I would not have remembered them. Like many other things in life, the lesson here was the trade-off. At the risk of coming off as making an excuse for myself, in hindsight, if I were to re-live the past decade, I would have taken the same path in life. The number one priority at the time was not the corporate grind, and I am grateful for what and who I was able to find and accomplish right before COVID crashed everyone’s party.
   

4. AI and LLM
   Every conference you went to starting in 2023 would talk about Generative AI, blah blah blah. I don’t want to go deeper into this. People without ML or Com. Sci. background has convoluted this term into something it’s not. I’m not putting myself on a pedestal, at the surface level, I have a certificate from Oracle and another one from MIT Professional Education to qualify. I skipped all the panels about these topics. From the practical point of view, the least one can do is download Ollama, install, and play with an LLM (inference) locally because you’re tired of all the guardrails major companies set to prevent you from jailbreaking their prompts. You’ll quickly realize how important hardware like VRAM is.

Here are some interesting quotes and nuggets from the speakers from different panels:

“Optimize for learning, don't optimize for the title.” - I know it’s true, but would the young audience in their 20s be able to grasp it? I know I would have trouble believing in it if I was in my 20s.

“Always ask yourself how do you provide value? One way is to be a domain expert”

“Evaluate yourself (your value) by pretending to take yourself out of the position at the workplace”

“Being uncomfortable is how you grow”

“If you want anything from other teams, set expectations, do pre-meeting prep by talking to stakeholders individually first”

“To build trust:
- Identify key stakeholders like the side pieces of a puzzle

- Bounce ideas with these stakeholders

- Expect that first year will be turbulent

- It’s natural to have doubts”

“To target companies on a different domain, customize your resume to align with that company’s vision to show how you can fit into the position that company is looking for.”

Key concepts: Long-term plan, fallback plan, journaling/reflection on wins & lessons learned, SWOT, mind-mapping