Will be 40 pretty soon and want to stay in technical roles, ideally backend engineer or related to AI/ML work. Will be with Cisco which is not great if you want to stay in technical roles but want to put the good work-life balance to use: Have pretty much done backend engineering in all of my career. Doing backend/data engineering for AI/LLMs now, but not have much experience with AI/ML projects. Any suggestions for certificate courses/online degrees from Stanford/Harvard that can help me stay relevant and technical for the next 10 years? I see plenty of options for ML courses(like this one: https://online.stanford.edu/programs/artificial-intelligence-graduate-certificate ) etc but would it be valuable in a few years and worth the effort? I don't see many courses related to backend engineering as such. Any suggestions would be welcome. TC: 400k YoE: 16 #engineering #software
Why don’t you want to become managers?
Not interested, especially not in Cisco..
Graduate certificates from SCPD is just a way for Stanford to extract money from corporate learning budgets. It’s not worth it.
So what is the alternative?
They offer full MS degrees that might be ok, but really at your level of experience academic credentials don’t matter unless it’s a networking thing like an executive MBA.