My wife just turned 40, has 12 YOE in the industry and is finishing a phd in computer science .. She currently works as researcher in computer vision at a university (total YOE is about 16). She loves the WLB and the university is letting her pursue her PhD for "free", but she only makes $60k/y. She thinks she can make $90k-100k once she graduates, but I keep seeing data scientists making huge money ($200-400k+)... I wonder, what kind of job can she get? She claims she can't code like an L4 production software developer, so I don't think she can be an applied scientist. But she's pretty decent at Python, C++, CUDA, and whatever else that is needed for computer vision research. A bit more about her: - She has a couple of patents under her name - She published in top conferences (like CVPR etc) and a-ok conferences - She worked 12+ years as top performer in companies as researcher (not in the US) But she's out of the corporate world for around 6 years already. Thoughts? 305
ML + computer vision that’s a killer combo. Product research type of roles at Instagram working on camera filters or she could join those autonomous driving ADAS or lidar startups where they scan point clouds of the road and identify objects. I think 200k plus easily.
Also robotics and drone companies. Robotic arms on the assembly line that use CV to pick items, optimizes packing. Drones that detect object on the warehouse shelves, trash on the ground etc. agricultural tractors that detects and removes weeds from crops.
My favorite ICs are often near retirement. Act young, tailor your resume to look like any other 30 year old coming in to a company (remove college grad date and more experience more than 10 years ago) and get in the door and wow them. Most age discrimination these days is actually experience discrimination imo, as long as you haven’t slowed down too much.
Can you explain the last sentence?
You get filtered out by a hiring manager because they have much less experience and their eyes glaze over trying to digest all the stuff accomplished over several decades by the applicant. For a mid level role they want to see a story they can identify with for the role, and you should be able to tell that story with the latest <10 years of experience
Short answer - not too late. She has at least 20 more years left in her career. More ahead than behind.
She definitely can do it. The only obstacle is to convince companies to interview her.
have her dm me, ill get her up to speed on the interview process she'll face, guaranteed she'll make at least 20k for the chat. No not troll
No, in fact you should do it rather sooner than later because what is SWE today will be heavily penetrated by AI over the next 10 years. It will become a new default skill set.
She should target companies like Cruise and waymo to start. Also GPU makers like NVidia.
She can make easy make 300k+ in Bay Area.
She can go for research scientist roles that are less coding heavy.
She “publishes in top conferences (like CVPR etc)” but she can’t “code like an L4 software developer”? These seem very contradictory. I don’t see a lot of top conference papers not involving a lot of software and coding to support CV prototypes. Also python, C+, CUDA makes a very desirable skill set. C+ and CUDA aren’t easy.
I am not a developer to judge how good of a coder she is, but for example she doesn't know any of the AWS production tools like EC2, Lambda, Dynamo ... I've seen her doing some pretty smart image segmentation without it though. for example, she was able to do some pretty badass occluded object search like figuring out what specific model of a car it is by only looking 1/4 of a rear bumper and very limited training data (useful for criminal prosecution applications)
she has a problem. She's too humble... SHE told me she can't code as an L4... so maybe you're right