6 ms·
Are these academic types great engineers? Do you find that the academics have a major edge in domain knowledge over self taught programmer?
by NHQ 4y ago
Are these academic types great engineers? Do you find that the academics have a major edge in domain knowledge over self taught programmer?
- xapata 4y agoYou're not really an academic unless you're working in the academy, right? Once you move to industry, you're a professional.
- NHQ 4y agoBe consistent, a move to industry makes you industrial. It takes mere oath to profess.
- angarg12 4y agoUsually you can tell people who are purely academic. They excel at domain knowledge but are almost naive about building real world systems. They might come in as juniors. I don't think we would loop anyone as mid level or above unless they have experience delivering working systems in production. Personally I don't mind the candidate's background so far as they can do the job (how the interview is a sucky way to determine this is another topic of conversation).
- NHQ 4y agoAt the end of the day, it is about engineering. I'm self taught as a programmer, and I have also translated the latest deep learning paperwork into live code, AND i have novel research and experiments in code repos (not papers). The thing lacking is a hacker's credibility as an ML researcher, which i think is ironically preposterous given the self-teaching of complex domains with engineered proof. I don't see what an PhD has on the class of self taught hackers is what I'm trying to say. Just kidding, I know the answer is that they are trained in a certain institutional mentality. Give me my downvotes.
- bazmattaz 4y agoI lead a Ml Product team and in my experience no they’re not. The academic types are very proficient at research and exploratory data analysis. They’ll whip up a Jupyter in no time but they struggle understanding a live production system. This is where an ML engineer comes into play, they’re not so academic but way better at writing production code
- NHQ 4y agoWhat of the engineer, who mastered a more complex domain on his own, perhaps innovates in that same domain regularly, do you suppose he can do the academic research?
- NHQ 4y agoSpicy comment >_>