5 ms·

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publicatio

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Yoric 4y ago
Hired in academia? Sure. Hired in industry. That's the opposite. I've had a friend who had to hide that they had a PhD to be hired...
- goethes_kind 4y ago
  I guess we are living in two different universes. Any job ad for an ML role or ML adjacent role says Ph.d required or Ph.d preferable. Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. For a plain SWE role a Ph.d might be a disadvantage here too, but for anything ML related it is mandatory from what I can see.
  - visarga 4y ago
    In my hiring experience as an interviewer, 90% of candidates with PhD or not will actually have mediocre grasp on ML. It is a rare happy day when I get a good candidate. We interview for months for one hire. I got to interview candidates worldwide so I've seen people from many countries.
    - nl 4y ago
      Was this hiring for ML positions? As someone who hired for this in general we'd use PhD (or maybe a Masters degree) as a filter by HR before I even saw them. It's true that a PhD doesn't guarantee anything though. I once interviewed a candidate with 2 PhDs who couldn't explain the difference between regression and classification (which was sort of our "ok lets calm your nerves" question).
  - antegamisou 4y ago
    Yeah, you don't want to be anywhere near a place claiming to hire HS graduates/4chan posters in disciplines requiring advanced knowledge for successful product development, unless, idk, they have demonstrated mathematical talent through well-established media e.g. math olympiads, thesis on some relevant discipline. Almost all the time, they're shitty startups, where bankruptcy is a matter of time, run by overpromising-underdelivering grifter CTOs pursuing a get-rich-quick scheme using whatever is trendy right now -crypto, AI, whatever has the most density on the frontpage-.
    - kelipso 4y ago
      Yeah true, I've had to work with too many fresh college grads to not relate to this. People try to take some rare case and generalize when that's really not applicable.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    I am in France. That was in bio-cryptography, which strongly uses ML. That was a few years ago, though.
Technotroll 4y ago
Sorry, that's patently untrue. Perhaps it's anecdotal, but I know a host of undergrads who got head hunted into quite elite tech positions either directly from Uni where I studied, or due to private projects they were in. And I even know a few that doesn't even have any uni edu that got hired to very high technical positions. Usually they were nerdy types who had worked with or had exposure to large systems for whatever reason, or who showed some promise due to previous work, demos or programs they'd made. But sure, most people have to go the edu route. It's the safest way into tech, as you are - at least in principle - fully vetted before you apply. Thinking that you can get a data science or hacker job just by installing Kali is ofc also very untrue.
- goethes_kind 4y ago
  I think my post is more representative of the truth than yours. I am sure you are telling the truth, but these unique talents you are talking about are not representative of the bulk of people working in research.
  - echelon 4y ago
    (My posting rate limit went away) The demand for AI/ML will fast outstrip available talent. We'll be pulling students right out of undergrad if they can pass an interview. I'm hiring folks off Reddit and 4chan that show an ability to futz with PyTorch and read papers. Also, from your sibling comment: > Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. Huge factor. US cares about getting work done and little else. Titles are honestly more trouble than they're worth and you sometimes see negative selection for them in software engineering. I suspect this will bleed over into AI/ML in ten years. Work and getting it done is what matters. If someone has an aptitude for doing a task, it doesn't matter where it came from. If they can get along with your team, do the work, learn on the job and grow, bring them on.
    - goethes_kind 4y ago
      Thanks for the insight. I hope you are right of course. Unfortunately, Germany is a bit hopeless in this respect.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Sorry, you don't need the Ph.D. publications at top 10 NLP venues are enough
theGnuMe 4y ago
Just as an fyi some of the top AI folks at OpenAI don't have PhDs. I remember reading that on Twitter (I think).
- nl 4y ago
  I think Greg Brockman falls into this category. Chris Olah was at OpenAI but is now one of the founders of Anthropic but doesn't have any degree (he joined Google Brain after dropping out of his undergrad degree). I think they are pretty exceptional though - most people on the ML team do AFAIK. Perhaps on the infrastructure side the backgrounds are different.
yawnxyz 4y ago
As much as I'd wish to say "you're wrong, people care about intelligent, passionate people who do great work, not PhDs" you're right about much of the work out there. We've tried many time to work with CSIRO (the NSF of Australia) and it's fallen flat. They love impressive resumes and nothing else. I'm having a chat with their "Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before. (And I'm a UX designer!) I think at most corporate firms you'll end up running into more resume stuffers than people who actually know how to use ML tools.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  > Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before Reminds me of Computer Security academic and professional pedigree where these people aren't even programmers

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Yoric 4y ago

Hired in academia? Sure. Hired in industry. That's the opposite. I've had a friend who had to hide that they had a PhD to be hired...

goethes_kind 4y ago
I guess we are living in two different universes. Any job ad for an ML role or ML adjacent role says Ph.d required or Ph.d preferable. Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. For a plain SWE role a Ph.d might be a disadvantage here too, but for anything ML related it is mandatory from what I can see.
- visarga 4y ago
  In my hiring experience as an interviewer, 90% of candidates with PhD or not will actually have mediocre grasp on ML. It is a rare happy day when I get a good candidate. We interview for months for one hire. I got to interview candidates worldwide so I've seen people from many countries.
  - nl 4y ago
    Was this hiring for ML positions? As someone who hired for this in general we'd use PhD (or maybe a Masters degree) as a filter by HR before I even saw them. It's true that a PhD doesn't guarantee anything though. I once interviewed a candidate with 2 PhDs who couldn't explain the difference between regression and classification (which was sort of our "ok lets calm your nerves" question).
- antegamisou 4y ago
  Yeah, you don't want to be anywhere near a place claiming to hire HS graduates/4chan posters in disciplines requiring advanced knowledge for successful product development, unless, idk, they have demonstrated mathematical talent through well-established media e.g. math olympiads, thesis on some relevant discipline. Almost all the time, they're shitty startups, where bankruptcy is a matter of time, run by overpromising-underdelivering grifter CTOs pursuing a get-rich-quick scheme using whatever is trendy right now -crypto, AI, whatever has the most density on the frontpage-.
  - kelipso 4y ago
    Yeah true, I've had to work with too many fresh college grads to not relate to this. People try to take some rare case and generalize when that's really not applicable.
- Yoric 4y ago
  I am in France. That was in bio-cryptography, which strongly uses ML. That was a few years ago, though.

Technotroll 4y ago

Sorry, that's patently untrue. Perhaps it's anecdotal, but I know a host of undergrads who got head hunted into quite elite tech positions either directly from Uni where I studied, or due to private projects they were in. And I even know a few that doesn't even have any uni edu that got hired to very high technical positions. Usually they were nerdy types who had worked with or had exposure to large systems for whatever reason, or who showed some promise due to previous work, demos or programs they'd made. But sure, most people have to go the edu route. It's the safest way into tech, as you are - at least in principle - fully vetted before you apply. Thinking that you can get a data science or hacker job just by installing Kali is ofc also very untrue.

goethes_kind 4y ago
I think my post is more representative of the truth than yours. I am sure you are telling the truth, but these unique talents you are talking about are not representative of the bulk of people working in research.
- echelon 4y ago
  (My posting rate limit went away) The demand for AI/ML will fast outstrip available talent. We'll be pulling students right out of undergrad if they can pass an interview. I'm hiring folks off Reddit and 4chan that show an ability to futz with PyTorch and read papers. Also, from your sibling comment: > Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. Huge factor. US cares about getting work done and little else. Titles are honestly more trouble than they're worth and you sometimes see negative selection for them in software engineering. I suspect this will bleed over into AI/ML in ten years. Work and getting it done is what matters. If someone has an aptitude for doing a task, it doesn't matter where it came from. If they can get along with your team, do the work, learn on the job and grow, bring them on.
  - goethes_kind 4y ago
    Thanks for the insight. I hope you are right of course. Unfortunately, Germany is a bit hopeless in this respect.

Der_Einzige 4y ago

Sorry, you don't need the Ph.D. publications at top 10 NLP venues are enough

theGnuMe 4y ago

Just as an fyi some of the top AI folks at OpenAI don't have PhDs. I remember reading that on Twitter (I think).

nl 4y ago
I think Greg Brockman falls into this category. Chris Olah was at OpenAI but is now one of the founders of Anthropic but doesn't have any degree (he joined Google Brain after dropping out of his undergrad degree). I think they are pretty exceptional though - most people on the ML team do AFAIK. Perhaps on the infrastructure side the backgrounds are different.

yawnxyz 4y ago

As much as I'd wish to say "you're wrong, people care about intelligent, passionate people who do great work, not PhDs" you're right about much of the work out there. We've tried many time to work with CSIRO (the NSF of Australia) and it's fallen flat. They love impressive resumes and nothing else. I'm having a chat with their "Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before. (And I'm a UX designer!) I think at most corporate firms you'll end up running into more resume stuffers than people who actually know how to use ML tools.

diceduckmonk 4y ago
> Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before Reminds me of Computer Security academic and professional pedigree where these people aren't even programmers