TC 180, 6yoe, Seattle.
I went from Systems Engineer to SDE after 2 years. Then SDE I > SDE II after another 2.5 years. Been SDE II for about 1.5 years. That SysEng experience hurts me at Amazon (waiting in line for L6 behind those more senior SDE IIs), but doesn't prevent me from interviewing for, say, a Senior SDE position at Microsoft (equivalent to upper SDE II at Amazon).
I switched teams to get some ML experience, but after a year of zero ML experience, I'm either going to try one more team at Amazon, or look externally for an SDE role for 230+ TC.
I really want to get into it. Some teams at Amazon allow SDEs to actually work on ML problems, and some severely bifurcate the science and eng teams. Currently on the latter.
I think it would be very valuable for my career in the long run to get some solid ML experience, but I also really want to stop taking such a fat opportunity loss. I feel that I'll have a better chance to get this type of position internally rather than externally. I've taken all the relevant internal ML courses. Recently tried applying to an external position that wasn't even advertised as requiring ML experience (although it was a service team for an ML) and I lost out to... someone with "significant ML experience in production". :|
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I think this question is really difficult to answer when you're approaching the decision by trying to predict whether companies will start looking for more and more ML engineers and scientists while there is already a huge number of people that can be a mediocre SDE.
My friend suggested a different viewpoint: he was viewing this as a question whether you can be "the best" at ML compared to being the best SDE. It seemed clear then that it will probably be nearly impossible to be a strong ML engineer or scientist compared to a bunch of others that go into that field with a PhD in our age, whereas you most likely have a higher chance on being a rockstar engineer at this point.
It comes down to what you want to do in your life, but the grass always seems greener on the other side :P
Disclaimer: I am still split between choosing ML team or cloud team rn..
I guess I'm not missing out on that much.