As an international student I am almost done with my master's degree in CS. Now I have to choose the career path that I should aim for. For the last 1 year I have been learning ML and CV. I was passionate about getting a role in the field. But I have heard that ML and CV roles are difficult to get for fresh grads and even more difficult to get it in top 5 companies. All I have been hearing is that only startups would take fresh graduates for CV and ML roles. But the downside with startups is the low package/pay and the difficulty of getting them to sponsor H1b which I will need eventually. Should I still take this route mentioned above( because I believe CV is the future ) or should I just start leetcoding / do some software developement/ SE projects and aim for the generic software engineer role in the top companies. The downside of choosing SE/SDE roles is that I have spent so much time and money trying to gain CV skills and I would not want that to go to waste. Also CV and AR will boom in the upcoming years( atleast I think it will) so I want to not miss an opportunity of grabbing a high pay role in this field. Please do let me know. Any Input from your end is valuable to me. It has become so difficult to have a vision to work towards, when I don't even know whether to continue with CV or focus on SE. Once I have a vision, I believe I will be way more motivated and productive. P.S. I I don't have any industrial experience/internships done yet in both these fields. I have completed 5 ML and 4 CV pet projects + online courses for CV. For SE I have not even started leetcoding.
Does OP get into CV job and is the pay less than SWE? And why do you think AV will boom and what product? Apple glass?
Leetcode. You can work on CV at a FAANG in a generic SWE role. I suggest you aim for that, and then maybe you like it. If not you’ll be connected to cv research teams and can switch / get names on papers and goto phd Note: may take internal transfer to end up on desired team. But look at things like Waymo perception team, or fb Oculus team, etc etc. the teams are out there and there’s an enormous amount of SWE work to be done
Thanks for the response. Just another follow up question, apart from leetcode what other areas can I improve to increase my chances of SWE roles in FAANG? Or is leet code pretty much the major thing they consider? I'm asking this because getting an internship lately has become very difficult and I was wondering if having less internship experience will impact my chances in FAANG even when I have necessary skillset
If you get the interview, nothing reeallly matters except leetcode. Internships help get the interview though. But I wouldn’t freak out too much. You could also just get a SWE job at some random company, and then apply. With any amount of real experience they are pretty liberal with who they interview