Staff engineer with 19 YOE and have worked on web and mobile apps throughout my career. Have used C#/.NET and Microsoft tech from early career. Currently 50% hands on and rest is leading projects and mentoring. Like most of the companies nowadays, my company is pivoting towards AI/ML and has been encouraging all of them to get on board for career growth. How to get started in Ai/ML given my background and role? Not sure if I can do in depth university level classes. Any practical no nonsense certifications/courses/boot camps y'all recommend? Company reimburses up to $3-4k per year on non subscription classes. I looked up a few and were intimidating. TC: 220k
Machine Learning on Coursera is popular and rigorous enough. Although a question - why would you not try to build a consulting business with your expertise?
I wouldn’t. It is a lot of stuff. Feel free to explore as hobby but I would leverage your current experience.
Learn the ML basics - old school linear/trees/boosting models on tabular data. Move to a science team working on building MLOps pipelines as an SWE to get more hands on experience. Given the current climate, all of them will move to implementing deep learning soon. So you get that experience. Jumping from basic DL (nn, rnn, cnn, autoencoders) to Transformers/Generative models is easy.
Apart from like 3.5 people, noone knows wtf they are doing when it comes to Generative models, so dont sweat that. Get some ML/DL experience as an SWE and soon you are an MLE with DL experience.
As for resources : basic ML - scikit learn documentation is a great place to start. It has the mathematical foundation and the implementations. Use gpt4 to understand the intuition behind the algorithms. Get some kaggle dataset and implement the examples in the doc. It covers everything that will get you a DS 2/3 job. MLOps - Chip hyuen's book will get you to 90th percentile. Basic DL - the Deep Learning book. If you can retain this, you know more than 95% code monkeys. I have a phd in this, so I put a lot of value in theory. Implementation is easy, but unless you understand what this tool can do you will only learn to implement by looking at others and always be in their shadows.
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When was the last time you had to take a piss test for work?
Genuine question: could you have alternatively become an L6 in faang working on web apps, but making 600k TC? Asking because that’s where I’m planning my career to head at and would like some advices
Not every chases TC. My brother genuinely wants to learn and contribute to the company even though he is under paid
Fwiw I'm in MCOL