TC premium for engineers with ML background
How much higher (or lower) is comp for ML engineers relative to general SWE with same YoE, after accounting for negotiation on competing offers and difference in career growth rate due to supply/demand for subject matter expertise?
Don't try to make yourself feel superior ⚔️
;)
Don’t do ML if you want to be SWE. Because SW work accompanying ML is tier 4. Only do ML if you are willing to be pure Research Scientist (not even so called Applied Scientist to avoid tier 4 SWE work). Let tier 4 engineers do the SWE work.
So SWEs in research-heavy orgs, for instance Brain and RMI at Google, are tier 4 in your experience?
Not necessarily the engineers (for Google and similar companies) but the most SWE work (not including the ML model design/tuning/paper publication) like training jobs, automation, data management, and so on. Developing and releasing Tensorflow or Opencv type software is exception of course. But those probably receive heavy input and guidance from the scientist for the interesting and challenging parts.
It really depends on your particular situation, ML experience is obviously not all equal. The difference will range from zero to 10x.
Let's consider the median for each job type. Comparing outliers would be hardly meaningful.
What is the median ML experience though? Can we assume a ML related PhD from a top university?