This told essay is based on a conversation with Emrick Donaday, 32, a New York-based software engineer at Google. His identity and employment have been confirmed by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
When I joined Google a few years ago, my role had nothing to do with AI.
Once ChatGPT came out, Google started to put more emphasis on LLMs, creating more opportunities for role switching within the company. Like others, I became more interested in exploring the area.
A few months ago, I switched to an AI role. Currently, I am a software engineer working on research on AI safety. It's basically similar to my last role, but instead of building software, I'm building an LLM that requires data, training, and compute.
Initially, I didn't think I would be able to work in the field of AI. I didn't have the right credentials and felt left out when talking to other teams because I had never even touched the product, let alone experimented with it. By creating them.
I was able to change jobs because I was at the right company at a time when demand was high, but also because I decided to participate in a hackathon. I think hackathons are the best way for anyone to get into AI.
I'm completely changing careers and it's all because of the hackathon that got me started.
Hackathon changed everything
I participated in and won hackathons hosted by Amazon in 2018 and 2019, and I have grown tremendously since then. When I saw the opportunity to compete against some of the brightest minds in the industry on the hottest topics in the industry, I felt like it was the perfect combination to learn a lot and possibly redefine my career.
I attended Google's annual employee-only hackathon in 2024. This hackathon lasted for 7 days. During that time, I worked on creating a new product and finally demoing it. I learned how to use the tools and started understanding bottlenecks and gaps. I also started to understand more about the not-so-sexy fundamentals of AI, such as how to build the infrastructure for an LLM and how to write algorithms to create agent workflows.
I'm not doing anything revolutionary. I created a small prototype, which wasn't very useful, but it was a good way to start. I played around with concepts like creating agents and fine-tuning the model.
Hackathons were a really good way to show myself that I can create something that I'm not familiar with. We ended up doing it a second time in 2025, opening up even more opportunities. For example, we were able to publish a technology launch with Google as a follow-up to our work at our second hackathon.
The work doesn't end at the hackathon
I have seen some colleagues transition to the AI team after the hackathon, but the majority did not. You can't just do a hackathon and stop there. You have to put that experience to practical use.
Thousands of people participate, so you have to be really good to win. Therefore, if you don't want to win, you should take the opportunity to talk about what you have created instead of letting the idea rot.
My team members and I did a lot of self-promotion. We presented the prototype and discussed it with many teams. I usually reach out to the technical lead of the group. Because they tend to have a high-level perspective and can quickly tell you whether your hackathon project makes sense for their unit after a 30-minute presentation. If not, give someone else's name and let them try it.
One-on-one meetings with strangers created a lot of connections to talk about my product. It made me more proactive and gave me some really great opportunities from the conversations.
I continued to improve my skills outside of hackathons. We learned to take full advantage of AI to speed up learning. I use tools like Claude Code to read code and documentation faster, Gemini and ChatGPT Deep Research for case studies, and tools like NotebookLM to consume more information at once.
I also watched Andrej Karpathy's YouTube videos and ran a podcast with a friend for software engineers and AI enthusiasts. We do it because it's the most active way for us to continue learning.
This hackathon proved that I am not late to the AI revolution by giving me unrestricted access to cutting-edge technology and direct connections with key decision makers, and gave me the technical confidence to bridge the gap from traditional engineering to LLM.
