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I’m not too surprised, they come by our shop around once a year wanting to sell Watson analytics, and because ML is a buss word in the political layer (our uppe

I’m not too surprised, they come by our shop around once a year wanting to sell Watson analytics, and because ML is a buss word in the political layer (our upper leadership) we politely listen. It’s not really great. They can automate the process of finding reports, but the truth is, we have people already doing that and all the reports they’ve been able to find in their POCs were either useless or some we already had. I’m sure ML has potential, but our analytics department is run by economists and political scientists who can really utilize ML and I’m not sure they could be retrained, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. We can’t really hire ML personal either. The only people who do it well enough are PHDs, and they have much better offers, and we’re at least 5 years away from having a candidate pool of people with the right education mix (Data + political science) and probably 10 years away from figuring out how to utilize them as well as finding enough funds for a position. So ML is mostly left to independent companies that corporate/consult with muniplicitaties in projected owned and run by the municipalities). IBM simply doesn’t do this, and the consultant companies that doesn’t suck all work with something else. Of course this is the perspective from the Danish public sector, it might be different else where, but I have friends who work similar positions as mine in banking, and they’re telling me the same thing.

TTPrograms 8y ago
>The only people who do it well enough are PHDs This is really untrue. Maybe that's part of your hiring issue.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  It’s always cute when people say stuff like that. We’ve tried quite a few and none have delivered any sort of useable quality.
  - pimmen 8y ago
    Swedish here, I'm convinced things are not that bad across the sound. I've seen people with masters degrees deliver really good ML systems. In my team the person with the highest education is also doing a PHD but the majority of us have masters degrees. But, sure, I've also met other companies in the same business who have multiple PHDs doing ML and they'd made a lot more progress than we had in some areas, but we'd made more progress than them in others (one company in Norway I was especially impressed with). ML development is very different from regular, software development and requires an affinity for math and creativity, sure, and a research background helps out a lot but I would not go so far and say that they're the only ones who are any good. Have you tried hiring people who have documented experience doing ML commercially? Because I could understand how you get bummed out a lot if you hire recent grads to do ML.

TTPrograms 8y ago

>The only people who do it well enough are PHDs This is really untrue. Maybe that's part of your hiring issue.

eksemplar 8y ago
It’s always cute when people say stuff like that. We’ve tried quite a few and none have delivered any sort of useable quality.
- pimmen 8y ago
  Swedish here, I'm convinced things are not that bad across the sound. I've seen people with masters degrees deliver really good ML systems. In my team the person with the highest education is also doing a PHD but the majority of us have masters degrees. But, sure, I've also met other companies in the same business who have multiple PHDs doing ML and they'd made a lot more progress than we had in some areas, but we'd made more progress than them in others (one company in Norway I was especially impressed with). ML development is very different from regular, software development and requires an affinity for math and creativity, sure, and a research background helps out a lot but I would not go so far and say that they're the only ones who are any good. Have you tried hiring people who have documented experience doing ML commercially? Because I could understand how you get bummed out a lot if you hire recent grads to do ML.