I have been working at IBM for roughly a year in Europe. I work as a Data Scientist in the Computer Vision and Natural Language areas. The project I was previously in was for a Information Retrieval Sytem for a large bank. However that project had the duration of only 3 weeks and now I have no project for 1 month. I was going to get inserted into two other new large projects in my area but the client ended up rejecting them. Now my manager wants to insert me into a SAP niche project (SAP framework for IoT with very few demand) with the minimum duration of 1 year. I never did SAP before and I don't want to change career to SAP, even more for a niche framework of it. They told me they will give me some training and the I need to stay minimum 1 year. My manager also told me they are having difficult finding new Data Science projects since the previous 2 were rejected by the client, so I should accept this SAP project. If I dont accept the project how long will it take until I am fired? I want to find a new job now but I do not want to completely destroy my chances at IBM. However, since they asked for minimum stay duration of 1 year, if I get placed into the project and then leave in the middle of it, it would be really bad for the SAP team ( should I care??). What would you do in my case? When I joined 1 year ago , I thought IBM was such a big company and that I would not have problem finding projects but I was wrong. I am constantly being changed projects, now I have difficulty finding a new one, now they want me to change career. I just want to leave since this does not seem like job security for me and I am not sure my manager still likes me.
Your poll is incomplete: 3) Accept project and leave asap It's nice that you still worry about your project teammates. But IBM is so big that everyone is replaceable. You leave and then they'll find somebody else to take over your job. Don't let others determine your career.
Tech Industry
12h
1861
Elon Musk did a Full Monty on his employees
Health & Wellness
15h
905
Issues with sleep
AMA
Yesterday
3209
I have worked at TikTok US core tech for 3 years. AMA.
India
16h
3060
Why is it so G*damn difficult to move money out of India
Cars
Yesterday
1998
Cyber truck killer: Chinese version of EV truck
Managers will always look for easy solutions. There are a lot of companies hiring for CV NLP profiles. Accept whatever is offered and start interviewing.
But I dont know anymore if I still want to make Data Science or ML. It is not that fun, it is just running models. Most of the models are not proprietary, i.e. everyone can go to the internet and download them, and the problem is on the data. At the end of the day the other companies are realizing they can do it themselves and they don't even want to send you their data, since the value is on the data. Then you need a lot of GPUs or TPUs to run the models in production and your company does not have this infrastructure. You end up doing boring analytics for a random bank or randomly sent to a SAP project like me. ML and Data Scientist are not that rewarding at the end of the day, after all the hard work this is what happens. You are just a resource for the company and even if you do great, guess what you may end up automating your own job... I doubt there are many other roles in IT where this can happen and even if you are good at your own field the company just sends you to another random role. I am done with this BS and probably out of DS and ML for my own good. I will look at Embedded Systems/ Android or Cyber Security instead. With Foundation Models like ChatGPT and Segment Anything ML it is going to get even worse. ML engineers and Data Scientists are the first to be replaced and not the last for sure.