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thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school

This amazes me. Are you leaving out more significant details? I cannot begin to imagine this happening where I live, in London. Being hired based on a MOOC? Did you go on to do some impressive projects which got you the job?

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I had a couple of cool personal projects, but what really impressed them was that I sent them a minimum viable product of what they were trying to build.

It was a music company so I put my hacky Perl skills to work and crawled youtube, songkick, musicbrainz and made a small music discovery website with cool features such as predicting the popularity of an artist based on social media metrics. I was like "I can do that look lol".

They called me for an interview, I showed them my notebook full of ML notes and they asked me to start on Monday.

So, even better than showing a degree issued from a prestigious and expensive school is to show your previous work.

Excellent, you're a great example of how this stuff should work!

Did they pay for the flight to Canada and accommodation for the interview, or did you?

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