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Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

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31–40 of 142 posts

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#31

After reading most of the comments I can try to provide a different perspective. I am a Director of Data Science and Software Engineering for a mid sized firm (~1000 employees and $150-200MM revenue). I started with a Finance degree then shifted into an analysis position at a FAANG (lots of excel, SQL, learning how to query big data). This eventually led to learning more about tech (python, AWS cloud stack, messaging…

We gotta stop saying 'FAANG' when MSFT is the arguably the top tech company around these days.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#32
Industrial engineer by training here, I honed my chops on Kaggle competitions, eventually winning one. I was recently brought into a FAANG in a ML/AI engineering capacity.

I can’t reccomend Kaggle enough for those who are looking to prove their abilities in the field.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#33

I am also an EE and have been able to apply ML to my field, wireless comms. It turns out people skilled in the intersection of two fields are very rare indeed. I'd suggest you look for an opportunity to apply ML/CV/AI in your industry (deep learning for PCB inspection maybe?). Show the possibilities, get some research funding, do a pilot program or similar. Lead and drag your company (kicking and screaming if need be…

Wireline EE here. ML in the context of wireline communications has been widely studied (grant money works that way). However, at least in wireline communications there isn’t a lot of gain to be had. This is because we have good physical models of underlying impairments and our ASICS are optimized using those physical models, so ML isn’t able to improve upon that much. Where it can help is where we don’t have good data on underlying physical parameters of the channel. So in this case, you can get a bit more capacity than you would otherwise. So for wireless where you have signal fading and huge variation in multi path interference, maybe there would be benefit as these phenomena are hard to model.

Also, you may not realize but we’ve been using ML techniques for decades in communications. Gradient descent is used to optimize equalizers; maximum likelihood estimation(and equalizer optimization) used for phase estimation in high order QAM. Plenty of other examples. So you probably are already familiar with much of the basic tool kit. I had a wannabe startup founder in ML tell me that there’s no way I could possibly understand the stuff if I didn’t have PhD in that area in CS (I am physics). I just smiled and nodded.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#34

After reading most of the comments I can try to provide a different perspective. I am a Director of Data Science and Software Engineering for a mid sized firm (~1000 employees and $150-200MM revenue). I started with a Finance degree then shifted into an analysis position at a FAANG (lots of excel, SQL, learning how to query big data). This eventually led to learning more about tech (python, AWS cloud stack, messaging…

We gotta stop saying 'FAANG' when MSFT is the arguably the top tech company around these days.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#35
It is extremely tough. I left my Civil Engineering career path in 2015 in search of a career in tech. I then applied to graduate school at SMU for an online masters in data science. I am still struggling to find meaningful work, but currently mentoring a data science bootcamp.

This is a very tough track but uf you have software development experience it should be easier to get a role in ML or Data Science.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#36

Industrial engineer by training here, I honed my chops on Kaggle competitions, eventually winning one. I was recently brought into a FAANG in a ML/AI engineering capacity. I can’t reccomend Kaggle enough for those who are looking to prove their abilities in the field.

Nice! Another pivot story. How did you make it past the Recruiters and their filters? Just with your kaggle portfolio? Any chance you can post a link to your kaggle profile. Congrats on winning Kaggle and that's no mean feat, considering the competition(pun intended).

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#38

This conversation might help https://twitter.com/suzatweet/status/1078446189593321472

The overarching theme of that thread reflects Max Woolf's comments: Companies(FANGMA)place a lot of importance on Accreditation and that is pushing a lot of capable folks out of ML/AI applied roles(not talking about inventing the next capsule network that requires a P.hD).

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#39
post #12

Maybe someone who actually works at FAANG can weigh in, but I would think that one of your best bets would be getting into one as a general SWE and then transitioning to AI/ML internally after a year. I recall Google even having some sort of internal program that encouraged this. Getting into Google is a moonshot, but it's possible to do so with no prior professional programming experience if you put in a ton of effo…

Random side note, but when is the 'FAANG' acronym going to die? MSFT is killing it, prob the top tech company around these days. Needs to be included in that list.

MAFANG?

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#40

After reading most of the comments I can try to provide a different perspective. I am a Director of Data Science and Software Engineering for a mid sized firm (~1000 employees and $150-200MM revenue). I started with a Finance degree then shifted into an analysis position at a FAANG (lots of excel, SQL, learning how to query big data). This eventually led to learning more about tech (python, AWS cloud stack, messaging…

I think this is great advice but there’s an important caveat which is career goals in AI / ML.

A lot of companies that say “data scientist” when they really mean “spreadsheet analyst” are places to avoid if you have career aspirations in ML. In the worst cases it can be a bait and switch (very common) to get overqualified people to babysit rudimentary analytics. Especially avoid places that might do this to pad their staff for any type of acqui-hire or investor signalling reasons, because your career goals will not be acknowledged.

In the best cases, it can be some befuddled IT manager who vaguely thinks they need “AI” but really they don’t have projects that would actually benefit from it. They might be sympathetic to your dissatisfaction in the reality of the job, but will have little power to do anything about it.

Somewhere inbetween is another very frustrating case: situations where the business or product clearly can materially benefit from “real” machine learning, and from the perspective of making customers happy & making money it’s a no brainer to invest time to research implementations, but risk averse management, often with no ability to gain an understanding of the benefits of investing in machine learning, or who want to act as credit / politics gate-keepers for an existing system, puts the brakes on it and retasks you on things that just waste your talent.

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