Need some career guidance
Been in research for the past 12 years... Work in the field of systems health diagnosis and prognosis. Don't do hard core coding on a daily basis but I have a PhD in cs and used to be good at it. I am good with physics modeling and simulation and also uncertainty management. Work with particle filtering and unscented filtering and Monte Carlo simulations The compensation is nothing compared to other bay area companies and of course no stock. I feel like a fool to have stuck to this job for so long. I want to do good work and get paid market value. But I'm scared that I am not employable In a bay area company any more. I would appreciable any advice you may have as to what should I do to feel employable again. Should I join the machine learning and data science band wagon? Or should I stick to my model based modeling and simulation and uncertainty management strengths? I know matlab very well... I'm learning python... But can I give a technical interview in matlab? What companies should I target? Any other advice? Thanks a ton!
oh no the feds are onto us. On a more serious note, wall street banks? Contact Jane Street.
They may want to do some practice interviews with some scrubs before trying for Jane street.
SpaceX?
Their comp isn’t amazing, but it seems like NASA -> SpaceX would make a lot of sense.
I'd think autonomous car startup given that he's probably done a lot of Kalman filtering and EKF. Although he'd need c++ skills
Well what do you want to do? Are you interested in data science or do you want to do hardcore sde or maybe a hybrid machine learning type role? There are some roles that seem to do Matlab if you do a search especially at startups. Apple is a good place to try or any place that makes HW. Those would be the low overhead options. People will make fun of MATLAB but if you're mathematical and think in terms of matrices it is convenient, it's just never going to be used for production so knowing C would be helpful also. I've never even got a phone screen at FANG but if you have a decent network that can refer you, you could probably get an interview. For those places I would just keep learning python and then practice the leetcode as most people will suggest.
I was in the same boat in a gov lab two years ago. Only know matlab. I spent a year taking online programming class after work( and during, cause gov job is slow), and did leetcode for year. I failed like 7 interviews, then I got competent enough to get an entry python position at my current company. I tried to go for data scientist at first but I found that to be too difficult to prepare for. Good positions needs ml, programming, and statistics knowledge. I ended up just shooting for software engineer position. Since you have cs PhD I feel you are in a much better position than I was. Mine was in math.
Learn Linux python ml/dl stack and get 40+% bump. Don't get overwhelmed by the fang talks on blind. The interviews are not that difficult if you prep for a month.