Even large corporations in this space pay relatively little for software engineers, and treat them with little importance. I also experienced "software enginee

Even large corporations in this space pay relatively little for software engineers, and treat them with little importance. I also experienced "software engineers" who had no idea what they were doing being given more credence because they had a PhD in some bio-related field. Oh, you got a PhD in some molecular aspect of some tiny piece of biology, and that makes you qualified to build big data systems? It did not. Apparently what that gives you is an adherence to reading decades old textbooks about database design. It was like working with a first year software engineering undergrad from twenty years ago. To be fair, it looks like the same can be said for machine learning. Many software engineers I know are in the "machine learning space", but report that they are just operations support for data scientists, and don't actually get to learn about, let alone be involved with creating, the models they support. If you are a software engineer, work in a software company, where engineering is the value proposition.