Quick Vent about Jobs

2 points by lartin_muther 2 years ago | 4 comments

I moved from biz ops to full stack engineering in 2018. "Learn to code" they said. I did.

Earlier this year I got laid off for not having 10 years of experience or a ML graduate degree. I've applied to hundreds of jobs over the last several months and can count my follow-up interviews on one hand. You can say "you're probably just a bad developer." It's ok. I know I'm not.

I feel frustrated and disillusioned. Looking into becoming an electrician, which should keep me afloat until they roll out the electrician robots in a few years. If you're in a similar boat, best of luck to you.

accrual 2 years ago |

Somewhat off-topic, but would be possible to secure an ML-adjacent job by bootstrapping oneself with online courses? I love the topic, play with LLMs and SD in my free time, but I would love to learn some hard skills and earn from it. I feel like I'll need to take a sabbatical to have enough time to develop myself though.

lartin_muther 2 years ago | |

Yeah, considered this. Talking to people in the industry it sounded like the ML field is undergoing a lot of the same issues even for people with grad degrees. I figured if I'm going to spend a bunch of months learning more skills it might as well be for something that my immediate surrounding community has more of a need for. But a valid point & definitely a path worth considering.

orangesite 2 years ago |

It's going to be tough for a while, if you have the opportunity to pivot to a more secure profession grab it with both hands!

lartin_muther 2 years ago | |

Thanks. Will do, most likely