this post: digging for information to help me target my studies, and know how to position myself. background: professional for 5 years in bay area tech, as a product designer. Skilled in front end dev. masters in cognitive science. currently: started with andrew ng’s course. finished deep learning track. moved onto fast ai. learned their stuff. currently write for towards data science, and have been able to recreate deep learning models from papers. thoughts: it doesnt sound like much, but I’m literally obsessed and study deep learni every day after work. I can implement networks from formulas in published papers and have dived deep into Pytorch. I consider myself fairly knowledgable in the small sphere of topics that I know. How likely is it that I’ll be able to break into the field on my passion alone? What minimum do I need to prove or show a prospective employer? My goal is to leave my current path this year and switch to deep learning before 2021. Also if you know, what sort of salary should I expect? if it helps, my business accumen and communication/presentation skills as well as “soft professional” and interpersonal skils are very well polished from my life in product. I also do my best to write production worthy code and stay up to date on engineering best practices. thanks!!
In most places I’ve worked, senior ML makes about as much as mid level frontend engineer, just because of supply/demand. But if you love it- just do it. Retiring at 42 vs 45 isn’t worth always looking out the window wishing you were doing ML. But there is a higher barrier to entry- most senior MLE I know have PhDs. Although I think hands on skills and a compelling portfolio still speaks louder than a degree. At least in CS startups and some bigtech. I say go for it because life is short and you’ll definitely die with money but maybe not satisfaction.
Midlevel Front end makes more than senior deep learning? Or are you talking “data scientist”. They’re not the same right? One is a data analyst and the other builds prediction models for computer vision, nlp, etc etc etc. How do you mean based on supply and demand? There are far more front end engineers than deep learning engineers? Curious if I’m reading you correctly
Not likely. Maybe by internal transfer or by going back to school. No one hires external candidates without the right background we get scores and scores of resumes where the only relevant thing is a coursera certificate. Yours won’t even get to hiring manager.
Are you at Comcast? I know lots of companies that hire based on merit, examples and quality of projects as well as process etc.
Not anymore. But off late there is a trend of not entertaining non phd candidates for entry level ml jobs everywhere unless they’re already working in the field. Try applying and you will see.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
779
Chances of meta clearing E5 with screwing up one coding one round and acing all other
2024 Presidential Election
Yesterday
2619
Biden ruined America and tech! Tax plans are insane
India
Yesterday
1701
Please vote sensibly 🙏
2024 Tax
Yesterday
4013
Biden’s new tax proposal is wild
Tech Industry
Yesterday
2204
So hard being a women in tech industry
Ask fewer questions, separate them across posts, more likely to get focused opinions. Just my two cents.
I also don’t want to live in the app though. Do you have any answers to any of them? I’m really just looking for brief moments of sage advice from those who can tell based on my situation. I’ll take whatever they offer
Unfortunately I don't. I'm a PM but I am starting DML and AI features.