That's great that you're interested in venturing into other fields! Switching fields every once in a while is a great way to grow and become a stellar engineer.

That's great that you're interested in venturing into other fields! Switching fields every once in a while is a great way to grow and become a stellar engineer. If you have equal passion for those two choices, I would suggest leaning towards machine learning for now. An ML engineer can make $300k-500k/yr at the big companies after a few years. I left that world and started doing language development as an open source endeavor, and make only $700/yr [0] which isn't that much, though I'm oddly more proud of that than the salary I got from my years in Mountain View. I'm happier, being able to push the state of the art forward and show people what incredible potential there lies ahead in the PL realm. However, I'd recommend graduates to focus on finances for a few years before looking at what lies beyond, lest the financial stress overshadow the dream. I'm only about 110,000 lines into my journey with Vale, but so far I'd say there's little math. There's a lot of data structures knowledge needed to make a compiler fast, and some interesting algorithms, but not much overlap with ML. But who knows, maybe there's some cool things languages can do specifically for ML, that haven't been discovered yet! [0] https://github.com/sponsors/ValeLang https://github.com/sponsors/ValeLang and I'm grateful to all of them!