Advice on switching tech companies for non CS major
Hi! I could really use some advice in terms of a career move I want to make in the next year or two. I currently work as a level 1 software engineer/Dev at a company that does image processing/exploitation. I like my job but I'm from the west coast and want to go home and I am really interested in getting into machine learning/ data science, not image processing. The problem is that I have a bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering and not CS. Whenever I look at job posts for level 1 or 2 I always see "must have degree in CS". I was thinking I need to get a masters in CS to stand a chance of getting a call back and have already started studying for the GRE. Is this necessary to get a job at a good company that does machine learning like google or amazon? I have a years worth of experience as a software engineer and did a summer internship at a large aerospace company as a data scientist. I am also going to have the core CS classes taken through algorithms by May as well. In addition I'm reading cracking the coding interview. Do I stand a chance of switching companies? Is there anything critical I should be doing or should I get a masters then try? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
You don’t need a degree in CS even for companies like Google or Amazon. You do need to know your CS fundamentals though if you want to pass the interview.
This. In your situation I'd stick it out one more year and try to get promoted if you can. If you think you can't get promoted then move. You might have better luck building your career at startups. They don't have HR droids screening resumes by keywords. I dropped out of University in my 4th year to basically just stay on at a job that started as an internship. Worked for ten years in multiple companies with an incomplete degree. Nobody cared because I had the work experience and knew my CS fundamentals. Eventually I took some night classes and finished my degree mostly because when I started moving into manager roles I started getting questions about it. Just questions though, even then I still got the jobs. But I ended those questions v by finishing it and fortunately I could do that at my school by distance education classes (I had all the core stuff just needed a few more credits in almost anything).
Eh, depends on how prestigious your school or current company is. Or you need to spend a lot of effort getting those interviews.
Nope not a factor at all. I majored in psych and the hiring managers at Apple I talked to loved it because of the different perspective. As long as you can prove you’ve got the technical chops it’s usually cool
Google would happily interview you. Maybe even Facebook.