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Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

As a data scientist, I would advise against moving from software engineering to ML. There is an enormous glut of junior DS/ML people. The boot camps and masters programs capitalized on the hype, and now there are way more than the market can absorb. Anecdotally, my recruiter spam has gone way down over the past couple years.

The only worthwhile related masters degree, IMO, would be in large AI from a top-tier university.

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>would be in large AI

Lol this does not currently exist. Sure some unis are doing LLM research at the doctoral level but no masters program is going to cover anything but the barest of basics of training or finetuning an LLM. You're honestly better off hanging out on r/localLlamma and r/machineLearning to keep up to date because degree programs are hopelessly behind.

Why not do both? I mean I like reading books on AI and papers but without a degree, you have no proof to the layperson that you’re more competent than any grifter claiming they’re an AI expert. Until you can have a conversation that is. A masters makes it easier to have the opportunity of getting a conversation where you can prove yourself. It’s a privilege gate-keeping tool but it is what it is. Alternatively, build something impressive and maybe that can do the talking.

I don't think it's just a gate-keeping tool. (Though it certainly has that effect.) We're rapidly approaching a point where, like for many other fields before it, there's just not much interesting amateur work to be done on large models anymore. You need to be affiliated with some sort of institution to get access to the necessary resources.

Maybe theoretical work such as developing fundamentally new neural network architectures that don't need to be proven out with a 7+ figure budget for training the model? But that would be more of a labor of love than a career strategy.

It’s at the point people are entering ML bootcamps that have zero interest in the science but a big interest in having a job. I have one anecdotal story about a friend of a friend doing just that.

Oh yes, it's been like that for years now. I see the attraction: high salary, cool title. But you need to have the right kind of brain for it, and more importantly, a lot of companies have gotten burned on their DS experiments and pulled back their investments.

It seems as though tech just has a junior person problem all around - this is abundantly clear in cybersecurity, where we have an overwhelming amount of people with useless bachelor’s degrees and no actual talent or experience to back it up.

How would you rate someone with a background in military cyber? (Or I wonder if you would see them at all, because defense contractors would sweep them up first?)

I’m probably the outlier on this particular note, but a lot of people view ex-military folks trying to get into cyber as God’s gift to this green earth, but I actually am hypercritical of those individuals. Reason being, having worked with several military branches for many years as a contractor, some of the least innovative, most incompetent people and education I’ve seen is in the military apparatus. If they worked for the NSA or were actual operators they know their stuff of course, but those people usually don’t have problems getting placed in industry afterwords.

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