4 ms·
You're right, but this is the same catch-22 for getting started in any nontrivial field. How do I get experience if getting a job requires experience? Having a
by edouard-harris 9y ago
You're right, but this is the same catch-22 for getting started in any nontrivial field. How do I get experience if getting a job requires experience?
Having an MSc / PhD in the field doesn't resolve this. HR departments use grad degrees as first-pass filters, and thereby miss self-taught people who are genuinely competent.
We try to solve for this by easing people into jobs with internships and work terms first. The community is a key part of that since it supports them if they get stuck on an implementation problem. And of course we're incentivized to make sure members perform well in the internship phase, since we make money when they're hired full time.
- ujal 9y agoI completely agree. Machine Learning is on the way to become a field like Web Development. There is a huge supply/demand gap that will only get wider.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoWith the caveat that holding a PhD is positively correlated with success in ML, and negatively correlated with success in web dev. (I'm guessing.)
- edouard-harris 9y agoHaving done both with varying success, I definitely agree that your brain needs to be wired differently for each. In web dev, experimentation is cheap, so you make changes fast and see what happens. In many ML applications, trying stuff is expensive in time and/or money. So the best strategy is often to think hard about what could be going wrong, and make and test explicit hypotheses. The difference definitely came as a surprise to me when I was making the transition.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoYeah, web dev seems to favor the bold, whereas DL or other highly brainy endeavors seem to favor the thorough / careful developer. For a long time as a non-web dev, I reckoned that I was smarter than 99% of the web devs. Then a web-dev friend of mine made his first few million $, and I reached some humbling conclusions.
- ummonk 9y agoSounds like I should start moving towards ML...
- tensor 9y agoIn this case there is no catch-22, you get experience by getting a Masters or a PhD. The truth is that there are enough people graduating with PhDs, and even more with Masters, that no one really needs to bother with people without a high school degree. The signal to noise ratio even for people with "just an undergraduate degree" is so high that I can't imagine even going to that level.