>I came very close in an interview for a company I really want to work for and the recruiter said to try again in 6 months because I was so close and they all w

>I came very close in an interview for a company I really want to work for and the recruiter said to try again in 6 months because I was so close and they all want me there, but just need a bit stronger technical skills. She said to focus on personal projects and take more classes if I can. Yeah, fuck that. As someone on the hiring side in a tiny consultancy that builds machine learning products for enterprise, I like when someone has worked on a personal project that mattered to them, end to end, not some portfolio building bullshit where they strap a half-assed Flask app on top of a sklearn model. However, I won't tell them to focus on that and retry in 6 months, and if I really want them, I won't care: there's a trial period of 6 months where they get paid full-time salary. I mainly reject lazy, assholes, and people who have no curiosity. If they're an engineer and it takes them a full minute to get to their working directory, it tells me things I don't like. We've hired 3rd year students with full-time employee contracts identical to everyone's. We're very flexible when they have to take exams or prepare or do homework. They work full-time only in the summer or during breaks. Our best hires were electrical engineers and physicists, even before I was involved with hiring (trained as an EE, taking bias into account). Anyway, I'm on mobile that recently went through a factory reset. I have no idea how much you will be paid, but the field is in flux. It's the wild west out there and there's the emergence of MLOps, where every asshole is building a platform (we built one internally not to die that we now offer to others. Yes, I'm an ML platform building asshole; but an agreeable one). Joining a consultancy/small company allows you to define your role. Everything is to be done and someone ought to do it. You probably will be expected to do some things, but won't be prevented to do more things depending on the complexity you can take on. You can learn a lot in terms of pretty much everything, and can use it like a launchpad. Again, not knowing how much you're paid and your opportunity cost. >The training program is 4 months in another country while getting paid (great!) but if you leave sooner than 2 years you have to pay back a large percentage of the salary you received during training (very odd to me). Fuck that, as well. I think I've seen it in the energy sector where they spend a good chunk of money on each candidate and train them on proprietary tech flying them around. You can find better, less stringent psychopathic. What are they going to teach you anyway ? How to train an sklearn model or something? You seem too balanced for that kind of cringe or to publish a thankful post on LinkedIn for the backpack, laptop, and CD-ROM they gave you and how much it means to you. Look, you went to a good school and seem motivated. Just don't associate with psychos for now. Then, whether you do a masters or not, I have no input on that.