Question: What is the job market like for folks who spend two months learning deep learning, either through a class like fast.ai or a bootcamp like Insight AI? What sorts of companies hire these people and how much do they pay? I know it varies, but I'm just trying to get a sense to calibrate my expectations of the current market. Thanks for any perspective anyone can offer.
As an outsider and / or away from the SV, where such an environment thrives and opportuinities are a few dozens, your mileage may vary a lot. Personal network is always better to refer to than shots in the dark though. In general, you might need showcasing your knowledge through marketable case studies in a sub-domain you are interested in, so that interviews will come from a shared context.
Exactly right - it's all about your portfolio. We spend a lot of time throughout the course talking about ways to build that portfolio, and folks on the forums support each other with feedback and help on these projects.
Completing a MOOC isn't going to help you land an interview for a job, generally speaking (although if it's any good, it should certainly help you once you do get an interview!) However if you use your study time to, for example, create useful projects that you make available on github, web apps that you host on heroku, deep technical blog posts you post on medium, etc then you should definitely get plenty of interview opportunities.
I've seen many many students go through this process, so I know it works. That includes students that hadn't been getting interviews or job offers - until I convinced them to spend time building a portfolio, and then they got multiple offers from top companies.
(There are some companies - not too many thankfully - that strictly require a PhD for DL applicants. I've noticed that such companies, that focus on credentials over actual work output, seem to overlap a lot with companies that turn out to have toxic cultures. So I'm not sure you should worry too much about them...)
