I run a team deploying machine learning systems in production, and I agree with most of this. None of us have a formal background in machine learning, and none

I run a team deploying machine learning systems in production, and I agree with most of this. None of us have a formal background in machine learning, and none of us have PhDs. We all came from traditional software engineering backgrounds, and I'd say we were all pretty strong in that area. Then again, we're not Google Brain, and we're not attempting to do original research or publish papers. We have very concrete goals for systems we want to build, and so far we've been able to achieve success using already discovered methods. Almost everything we do is traditional engineering to build training datasets and deploy models to production on live data. We also spend a considerable amount of time preparing and delivering presentations on our results and services, so believe it or not interpersonal and presentation skills are actually quite important.