Been in research for the past 12 years... Work in the field of systems health diagnosis and prognosis. Don't do hard core coding on a daily basis but I have a PhD in cs and used to be good at it. I am good with physics modeling and simulation and also uncertainty management. Work with particle filtering and unscented filtering and Monte Carlo simulations The compensation is nothing compared to other bay area companies and of course no stock. I feel like a fool to have stuck to this job for so long. I want to do good work and get paid market value. But I'm scared that I am not employable In a bay area company any more.
I would appreciable any advice you may have as to what should I do to feel employable again.
Should I join the machine learning and data science band wagon? Or should I stick to my model based modeling and simulation and uncertainty management strengths?
I know matlab very well... I'm learning python... But can I give a technical interview in matlab?
What companies should I target?
Any other advice?
Thanks a ton!
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I tried to go for data scientist at first but I found that to be too difficult to prepare for. Good positions needs ml, programming, and statistics knowledge. I ended up just shooting for software engineer position. Since you have cs PhD I feel you are in a much better position than I was. Mine was in math.
On a more serious note, wall street banks? Contact Jane Street.
There are some roles that seem to do Matlab if you do a search especially at startups. Apple is a good place to try or any place that makes HW. Those would be the low overhead options. People will make fun of MATLAB but if you're mathematical and think in terms of matrices it is convenient, it's just never going to be used for production so knowing C would be helpful also.
I've never even got a phone screen at FANG but if you have a decent network that can refer you, you could probably get an interview. For those places I would just keep learning python and then practice the leetcode as most people will suggest.