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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

As an ML researcher without a masters or PhD that’s not necessarily true. Companies reach out to me and say things like “we are really excited to talk to you about opportunities, especially given your 4 years of production ML model work and research”

Then right before interviews I hear, “well we like you, but didn’t realize you didn’t have a PhD. We have a really awesome software engineering / machine learning engineer opening that’d be great for for you. That’s what we’ll do the interviews for”

Cool. Probably happens 2/3 the time, honestly.

Just ask me about my parents, research, and projects...

Anyway, point being you can’t 5x with a B.S. in C.S. That’s why there’s a “lack” of talent.

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A lot of the PhD requirements actually comes from the grants and R&D tax benefits these guys are after. For a lot of those you have to justify you have the right workforce.

If you are talking about the R&D tax credits there is nothing that says you have to have a PhD. We get a bunch of these every year and we only have one person with a PhD that is part of the research.

If you have a reputation in your field for good research and top-tier publications, like a PhD would, then I'm really surprised that you are being treated any differently.

There are some famous computer science researchers with no PhD, but they do have the papers to back themselves up.

I think they normally would, but I’m pretty young (27) so they don’t assume I have that. The HR folks who set this up are typically checking boxes and don’t realize equivalencies.

My usual tactic is to mention the patents and send some of my work and they reconsider.

In either case, my general point was that the 5x salary bump is pretty much reserved for an artificially set subset of people.

> sseveran 5 hours ago | favorite[-] [collapse root]

If you are talking about the R&D tax credits there is nothing that says you have to have a PhD. We get a bunch of these every year and we only have one person with a PhD that is part of the research.

How did you get 4 years of experience in ML at 27? care to share?

> How did you get 4 years of experience in ML at 27? care to share?

Presumably they've been working in ML since they were 23? What's so crazy about that?

Probably technically it’s been longer, but I built neural networks in OpenCL in 2014 (22 years old). That was for a research project at university.

In 2015, I started building ML models full-time at two large companies. First while I school, as a contractor, then joined full-time after school

This depends on the company but my understanding is that in most tech companies, there's not much distinction between being an ML engineer and being a research scientist/engineer with a Ph.D, in terms of the type of work or compensation, provided that you aren't in a pure research role (i.e. you were hired because your research is highly regarded by academic peers in a narrow field and get to do something close to original research with fellow academics). Most Ph.Ds aren't qualified for the latter type of positions either and the number of non Ph.Ds that are qualified would be entirely negligible.

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