
Ask HN: Can a self-taught developer get hired in AI/ML without a degree? - gremlinsinc
I&#x27;m a laravel developer, and do a lot with vuejs&#x2F;jquery etc.<p>I am absolutely fascinated by everything going on with AI, and would like to go all in via udemy&#x2F;coursera and other online resources to learn ai&#x2F;ml.<p>Is there likely to be jobs in that sectors for people who do not have a bachelors&#x2F;masters or phd in comp-sci?
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mindcrime
Depends on what you mean by "jobs in that sector". If you mean doing cutting
edge AI research at Google or Facebook, I'm going to guess the answer is
closer to "no". Although, "never say never". But OTOH, if you're talking about
doing _applied_ machine learning at Lamardcky Furniture Manufacturing in
Skelfootville, WV, then the answer is probably very close to "yes, certainly".

The question many (maybe most) companies are going to ask is simply "can you
create value?" If you can create value for a company by helping them reduce
costs, or increase revenue, or both, you can probably find a job.

Coming at this from a similar position (did not complete my b.s. degree and
have only 3 a.s. degrees as formal credentials), I have come to believe there
is a crucial extra bit that factors in. And that is _domain knowledge_ as well
as general business understanding. You can understand the math behind back-
propagation and gradient descent as well as any Ph.D., but if you don't know
how to apply that to solving an actual business problem for a particular
organization, you aren't going to be able to create much value for them. So if
you really want to find a job, you may find that there's value in taking some
business classes as well, and choosing a domain to really dive into. This is,
of course, assuming you'd be content to chose a role that's more of "applied
ML" as opposed to desiring to do cutting edge research.

If you want to do cutting edge research without formal credentials, I don't
have any definite advice for you. I believe it's possible to get there, but
I'd be entirely speculating as to the details. Well, besides just setting up
shop for yourself of course. Then you can research whatever you want. The
issue there might be paying the bills if you can't convert what you do to a
revenue stream pretty quickly.

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jamesmp98
"The question many (maybe most) companies are going to ask is simply "can you
create value?" If you can create value for a company by helping them reduce
costs, or increase revenue, or both, you can probably find a job."

Unfortunately, a lot of times companies don't understand that something will
add value or make revenue.

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wayn3
95% of "ML Engineers" couldn't perform a matrix multiplication if you held a
gun to their head. That's a good proxy for "they don't know what the f they're
doing". You'll be fine.

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gesman
Here:

[http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/23/focus-on-
coding/](http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/23/focus-on-coding/)

