Distributed system E6 generalist in my early 40s. Pretty happy with my work, team, scope and everything. But every time I heard people talking about AI, I feel like I'm an outdated old man. Took the Introduction to ML course by Andrew Ng before Coursera was founded. I was able to complete the course with ease, but I was 10+ years younger at that time. Anyone in the same boat? if yes, how did you start?
Jump on it
I see distributed systems without ML but I don’t see ML without distributed systems. It’s a hot topic, but I don’t think you need to rush there if you are not interested just to feel younger. :)
Enjoying your work is rare. Don’t mess it up. You won’t be doing bleeding edge research anyways. And there are enough coding monkeys building pipelines for AI.
That course was much harder than the ones he has on Coursera nowadays.
If you can hack the linear algebra then it's easy. And if you can't then you can just stay at the API level and it's still easy.
It really depends on what you want to get out of your career and how much longer you plan on working. Are you chasing $? I left a director level Gig to back to IC because I wanted to immerse in cool tech, and don’t need the money. If you’re into AI or chasing $, then do it. If not, keep doing what you’re doing.
Ditto