Top School PhD vs SWE
Kinda like this post ( https://www.teamblind.com/post/StanfordCMUMIT-PhD-vs-SWE-SfXAFLSZ ) but what's different for me is: 1) I did undergrad from a top school, 2) I have 0.5 yoe currently (1 yoe if i quit and join PhD) at Amazon as SDE making 130k base (pretty much still the honeymoon phase rn; my team is awesome but not ML related), 3) I'm still on F1 OPT, second year (out of 3) going into H1B lottery. I think PhD opens up career choices although many say PhD does nothing for your career, which confuses me: Good ML positions all require PhD and moving from SWE to MLE/RS doesn't seem as easy as before any more. I'm happy with my pay for now with 1 yoe but I wish the job could be better (bc it's Amazon and I'm an SDE; I couldn't even get to the interview for other FAANGs/top tech companies in my junior/senior recruitment cycles). I'm not sure how much growth I could have here, but I don't think I know enough about the industry yet. I got a PhD offer from a top 5 school - should I leave my job and do the PhD? I'm in ML/NLP so it's really the hottest field right now. Advice? Thank you in advance!! #tech #swe #softwareengineering #phd #nlp #ml #amazon #google #meta #microsoft #faang
BlindDepends on if you need money to live or not. Rich parents? Great then PhD. Otherwise gonna be tough to live on a $30k yearly stipend even if you grind internships while doing your PhD. If you wanna be stagnant career and money wise for a few years then go for it.
I have a master's in ml and I've considered doing a PhD many times. Every ML PhD I've talked to in faang has told me to not do a PhD, unless I plan on going into academia. Do the masters and gradually transition into ML, if you aren't in it already. There are NLP phds from top schools on my team doing the exact same thing as me. It's not guaranteed that you'll be working on cutting edge research, even with a PhD. I do modeling and experimentation in an AI org, so this much is at least possible with a masters.
Yeah if i could be at google doing ML I wouldnt care about PhD either, but it’s almost impossible for me to get there from where i am rn, or even with a master’s bc i would be competing with PhDs for those positions… How and when did u get into Google if you dont mind sharing?
If you are not interested in academia, masters would be enough
Do the PhD and leave with free masters
PhD really only helps for research and paving brand new roads in industry, which is why so many PhD candidates and graduates work or are wanting to work in AI/ML If you wanna be a normal code monkey, an undergrad degree is enough If you wanna be a code monkey that discovers new bananas, go back to school