My BS was in Mechanical Engineering / Industrial Engineering / Operations Research. I worked for a big automotive company for 3-4 years after graduation in a non-tech role (more like product / business analyst but only used Microsoft Excel). I, then, did my MS in Mechanical Engineering / Industrial Engineering / Operations Research (all courses were ML / CS / Statistics based / focused). After graduation, I’ve been working as MLE / DS for the past 5 years. However, I haven’t done hardcore ML engineering / research / infrastructure work, it has almost always been Applied ML, which is applying XGBOOST / LIGHTGBM / logistic regression to tabular datasets (preparing these datasets takes 80% of my time) to solve business problems, get some predictions / inferences, and generate actionable insights. Although I’ve definitely built some airflow data pipelines and deployed some ML models using AWS, but it was never the major portion of my job. I’ve noticed people with the latter kind of experience being the most valuable and most sought after. It gives me a lot of anxiety and panic attacks that I ruined my career by wasting a total of 9 years just doing random Jupyter notebook work, which is most of the time just data aggregation, data consolidation, data processing, data preprocessing, training a model, running inference, and generating insights. I struggle immensely to convince HMs / recruiters to hire me, as they see my work as very low value. TC ~ 250k #tech #spotify #swe #faang #bayarea #datascience #machinelearning #machinelearningengineer #microsoft #softwaredevelopersalary #softwareadvice #netflix #airbnb #daatbricks #personalfinance #mentalhealth
U have an awesome TC when compared to many non tech guys with tons of experience. Stop feeling bad and become a master in what u do, u ll get there
As a DS/MLE and increasingly AI Architect myself, I think you have a point. I wouldn’t go as far as to label your career as ruined but Jupyter Notebook type of work of building models is increasingly automated (hello AutoML). You need to pick your bets and grow into one direction. Either you focus on the data prep piece and move to a Data Engineering role where your data pipeline building scope increases while your DS work decreases and develop into a Data Architect. Or, you level up your DS game and move away from supervised learning with tabular data because this is increasingly automated and augmented with junior DS (and even analysts those days). Can you make the switch to MLE and shadow the existing people who build those pipelines? Can you take ownership of an entire project end to end from data prep to deployment pipelines? Can you move to a different use case type such as GenAI which would likely also expose you more to the Architectural piece of DS. I made such transition 3 years into my career and it took a good year for me to become a MLE and eventually another to master also the architecture piece. Now I‘m mostly working on GenAI and take care of building the production workloads and architecture, less the inner loop of iterating over small improvements in output quality/ model performance.
I want to transition into high paying management/leadership roles. If I stay course with Data Science / Product Analytics / Insights Generation etc. … I’ll ‘likely’ become Director / Sr. Director of DS / Analytics, where I’ll be leading DS / Analysts and it’ll not pay as good as EMs / Engineering directors. I might be thinking about this all wrong, and that’s why I’m trying to solicit some feedback/opinion/perspective/wisdom.
That is a completely different track. You may want to consider becoming a SWE in that case to master the basics. My recommendations were for the DS function.
$250K is a ruined career? Perhaps some perspective may help. You have a whole life ahead. I changed my career in late 20s with an MBA. And then again in early 30s, and it was fine. You will be fine, keep building skills and growing and you will make more money than you can possibly use. This will be a blip in your long career of 40 years. NW: $10M, TC: $1.2M
Curious, what kind of role after MBA gives that kind of TC?
Director of product or Sr. Manager of Product? Also, AMZN TCs are inflated this year.