Got my master's and PhD while working over many years. A lot of my colleagues became adjunct professors, or worked in international relations in countries whose languages they researched. I'd like to get into tech - make the minority languages I worked on usable on computers; design fonts and input editors; work on speech recognition. Is this realistic? My programming skills would be laughed at - I know some basic C, Python, and Java - but I designed fonts and IMEs as part of my thesis. I applied for language-related positions at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and speech scientist positions at two more companies, but couldn't get a reply. I'm not unemployed so I'm hardly desperate like some folks, but the job I've got isn't very special and doesn't even require a bachelor's or even a single YoE. The pay is in line with those conditions. Is it worth attempting to somehow get into tech? If there isn't, I'd still gladly donate my research to someone who is working in the field, just so that it will have some impact. I hate to see it die. But ideally I'd be doing the work myself! My TC is low enough, and I have enough savings, that I'd take any low-paying or even unpaid internship to get into the field. Any thoughts or ideas would be very much appreciated!
Data science, NLP
That's what I'd love to do. I actually took a lot of physics and math as an undergrad, but that was more than 20 years ago. Those fields didn't exist then like they do now. My postgraduate work was kind of traditional and my professors didn't know a lot about today's digital world. I had to educate one of them on what Unicode's multilingual planes were, and how encoding works. I loved my studies but wish I could have had mentoring there.
Data scientists get paid less than SWE for a reason.
I can refer you to Starbucks for a barista role
Would probably pay better than what I'm getting now! 😅
Apply to one of the programs at Insight Data Science
This
Googling them now; whoa, that is exactly what I'm looking for! Would have to quit my job and take a flying leap, it seems... might be worth it!
Are you american citizen? It would be a cakewalk since everyone looks for talented people willing to learn in the bay area
American citizen, though I live abroad. Looking to go back to my native NYC first and foremost.
NLP is your area!
That's exactly what I'm looking to get into!
Then invest in learning NLP and latest areas of development there. You will need to learn some amount of programming, preferably python. Build a portfolio of projects on kaggle/GitHub, apply to FAANG and you will most likely get through. PhD in linguistics along with programming expertise in NLP, it's an ideal skill set for a rapidly developing area.
ALEXA
Would _love_ to work on Alexa. Alexa data could be used to discover all kinds of things about local dialects, too.
Google hires a decent amount of linguists. If you have contributed to significant projects that can show your impact, you should have a shot. If you’re looking to get into core technology positions (swe, research), you’ll have to show more hands on experience or go through a good degree program.
I actually got a referral from an acquaintance working at Google right after I graduated and had a phone screen soon after. We had a great talk, but nothing came of it and future online applications haven't gotten any response. The projects I worked on were not "significant" by most people's standards, probably. I was researching the endangered languages of some small islands and developed a font to type their otherwise-unencoded writing system. The language has a few hundred speakers and is pretty obscure.
It should be plenty possible these days. I have a similar story - can't say too much while staying anonymous, but I too have a PhD about a minority language. Started out just doing data quality, but quickly ended up doing all kinds of things. However, it's unlikely you'll find anyone to pay you to work on truly low resource languages. If you do find someone, let me know and I'll join you!
I don't need to get paid to work on those; I'd be happy to do financially viable work. That was just what I researched in the past and what my publications are about, so I hope they impress people. (I suspect not.)
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Voice Design Research
Just applied for a Speech Scientist position! (Was ghosted...) I studied phonetics and prosody extensively and would love to do that almost as much as I'd like to work on minority languages. What skills, in addition to linguistics, do you need to be a good applicant for that stuff? Obviously just a linguistics doctorate isn't going to be enough.
Look into Amazon, Google and other companies that support localization and internationalization for voice design.