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I've hired a person without even a bachelors. They competed in Kaggle competition relevant to what we were working on, and were one of the top competitors. I re

I've hired a person without even a bachelors. They competed in Kaggle competition relevant to what we were working on, and were one of the top competitors. I reached out, hired, and it worked out well for all sides. Eventually, they left to do a startup. But we got our money's worth, and they got a decent salary for a while, and a decent spot on their resume. I don't think the emphasis should be on Ph.D so much as on demonstrating your competence. A thesis is a way to do that. Kaggle is another. A startup is another. So is doing some interesting crunching on data sets and writing blog posts or articles. Another way is to work up from Analyst to Data Scientist to ML (or other jobs -- you might be able to start in ML at a startup at a low salary). But if you have no track record, you'll need to get one somehow. A single course degree isn't sufficient. That's 1/32nd of a Bachelor's degree, 1/8th of a Master's, or 1/25th of a Ph.D.

jdonaldson 10y ago
If you hit Ph.D. level, courses are an afterthought, and no longer a meaningful measure of the progress on your degree. The situation reminds me of the first dotcom bubble, when folks were getting hired to write web apps with little formal training. I can only imagine the technical debt that is accumulating right now in the industry.
- webmaven 10y ago
  > folks were getting hired to write web apps with little formal training Yes, well, at the time, most people with formal training wouldn't go near a web app project with a ten foot pole ("it'll all end in tears", they said). And old-school Unix hackers versed in Perl weren't necessarily any more likely to have a related degree. > I can only imagine the technical debt that is accumulating right now in the industry. Don't worry about it. Most technical debt will get wiped out with the failure of the company (usually for reasons unrelated to technical debt). Companies that survive will do so despite the technical debt, and will have the resources to rewrite things (hopefully avoiding Second System Syndrome). OTOH, I can only imagine the future pain that low quality DL software patents are going to cause when IP from failed companies gets sold off.
jayajay 10y ago
Would you consider someone with a physics and math degree, and some online ML course experience differently than someone with a degree in, say, CS?

jdonaldson 10y ago

If you hit Ph.D. level, courses are an afterthought, and no longer a meaningful measure of the progress on your degree. The situation reminds me of the first dotcom bubble, when folks were getting hired to write web apps with little formal training. I can only imagine the technical debt that is accumulating right now in the industry.

webmaven 10y ago
> folks were getting hired to write web apps with little formal training Yes, well, at the time, most people with formal training wouldn't go near a web app project with a ten foot pole ("it'll all end in tears", they said). And old-school Unix hackers versed in Perl weren't necessarily any more likely to have a related degree. > I can only imagine the technical debt that is accumulating right now in the industry. Don't worry about it. Most technical debt will get wiped out with the failure of the company (usually for reasons unrelated to technical debt). Companies that survive will do so despite the technical debt, and will have the resources to rewrite things (hopefully avoiding Second System Syndrome). OTOH, I can only imagine the future pain that low quality DL software patents are going to cause when IP from failed companies gets sold off.

jayajay 10y ago

Would you consider someone with a physics and math degree, and some online ML course experience differently than someone with a degree in, say, CS?