from Hacker News

How I Became a Machine Learning Practitioner

by sama on 7/30/19, 3:02 PM with 47 comments

  • by TrackerFF on 7/30/19, 10:58 PM

    I think it's doable if you're at the right place and have enough opportunities around you, and something to show for. I feel that companies and startups around tech hubs are more willing to give someone a chance, and look through the formality, if you manage to convince / impress them.

    Where I live, far away from tech, it's almost impossible to land a job in ML / AI / DS unless you have a (minimum) Masters degree in something relevant. Preferably a Ph.D and solid experience to show for - I know because I work in the field, and lots of F500 dinosaurs are just now waking up. But are also unfortunately clinging to their old ways of hiring people.

    Schools all over are also picking up slack, starting to offer specialized graduate degrees in those domains. When I got my degree in ML, it was a sub-field at my schools engineering department, mixed up with signal processing and control theory groups.

    When first trying to get a job, the main problem was to explain what I actually could bring and do, and a lot of the recruiters or managers had no idea what Machine Learning was. Then you said "It's basically Artificial Intelligence" and, and they were instantly wooed.

  • by minimaxir on 7/30/19, 7:25 PM

    Given that Greg Brockman was the CTO of Stripe before OpenAI, that's a order of magnitude more technically/CS capable than the typical reader who might be looking into ML.

  • by jorblumesea on 7/30/19, 8:44 PM

    Does anyone not want to become a ML engineer? Is this the future, and will we even have a choice or else be out of a job?

  • by mychael on 7/30/19, 9:45 PM

    Congrats on your cool life, your ivy league education, your CTO role at OpenAI and all the access that provides. You've done it!

    Also thanks for telling us how you became a practitioner. It's definitely relatable and not a humble brag at all.

  • by croh on 7/31/19, 5:09 PM

    Indeed inspirational article.