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Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#11

Post by f6v »

Not exactly AI/ML, but I had some years of experience in Android, then RoR and engineering management. Then got an MS in Bioinformatics and now do PhD in Medicine. Which is really data analysis of sequencing data. I use some “AI” models as well. I’m doing a PhD at a company, away from the academic institution where I’m formally enrolled. So it’s kind of like a regular job.

But I’ve also seen colleagues pivot into data engineering. They’ve done it within the same company by simply asking, I guess? When there’s a role available and you do your homework there’s a chance to change the field.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#12

Post by gardenhedge »

safog wrote: post #9
LZ_Khan wrote: post #2

From my experience, there are plenty of teams in FANG that will hire you as a backend developer in a ML team assuming you can pass their interviews. 90% of the work in these teams is not core ML and is more mundane work supporting these models, such as data piping, cleaning, feature generation, experimentation, and real-time serving. You'll get plenty of experience in working directly with ML systems. The jump to cor…

FWIW I worked at Amazon in one of these teams and it's not something I found very interesting. You get thrown a random binary that some ML researcher compiled with instructions to host-it. No sense of ownership over the product, you're just an Ops frontend for a researcher so they can do the fun stuff building models and you're dealing with the pagers.

That sounds like the worst kind of tech position to be in

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#13

Post by echelon »

Quit my job in Fintech to work on my own AI startup.

I built https://FakeYou.com as a side project, and it blew up. I quit my job after I realized the potential, added monetization, and started to broaden what we do.

I've been working on https://storyteller.ai for a year and plan to launch our platform soon.

Both of these tool sets reinforce one another.

I'm hiring folks that were engineers that want to do AI instead. Please reach out! Our stack is Rust / Unreal / Pytorch / k8s.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

safog wrote: post #9
LZ_Khan wrote: post #2

From my experience, there are plenty of teams in FANG that will hire you as a backend developer in a ML team assuming you can pass their interviews. 90% of the work in these teams is not core ML and is more mundane work supporting these models, such as data piping, cleaning, feature generation, experimentation, and real-time serving. You'll get plenty of experience in working directly with ML systems. The jump to cor…

FWIW I worked at Amazon in one of these teams and it's not something I found very interesting. You get thrown a random binary that some ML researcher compiled with instructions to host-it. No sense of ownership over the product, you're just an Ops frontend for a researcher so they can do the fun stuff building models and you're dealing with the pagers.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#18

Post by haskellandchill »

you can do anything if you are able to convince your interviewer that hiring you will work out. I transitioned from web dev to data science by getting a VP of data science to work with me as lead engineer on their projects then studying in my free time and doing well on data science interviews to get a lead data scientist position. I went back to software engineering and now I am thinking about the same as you are. I will leverage my Data Science background, study, and do some ML projects. That should make me competitive in interviews and I expect to transition by the end of the year.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#19

Post by LZ_Khan »

gardenhedge wrote: post #12
safog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I worked at Amazon in one of these teams and it's not something I found very interesting. You get thrown a random binary that some ML researcher compiled with instructions to host-it. No sense of ownership over the product, you're just an Ops frontend for a researcher so they can do the fun stuff building models and you're dealing with the pagers.

That sounds like the worst kind of tech position to be in

As a sort-of counterpoint I work at a non-amazon FANG where I am much more involved in model training and evaluation. I still have never needed to define a model myself, but it's much more complicated and far more ownership than someone throwing me a binary. I think that speaks much more to what's going on in Amazon *grins*.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone made the transition from app development to ML/AI work?

#20

Post by bilsbie »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #2

From my experience, there are plenty of teams in FANG that will hire you as a backend developer in a ML team assuming you can pass their interviews. 90% of the work in these teams is not core ML and is more mundane work supporting these models, such as data piping, cleaning, feature generation, experimentation, and real-time serving. You'll get plenty of experience in working directly with ML systems. The jump to cor…

What terms would you search for for those first type of jobs?
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