Are you doing online courses in the hopes of learning to code -> getting a job in ML?

[hwasiti (Haider Alwasiti)]

@Ekami

After 2 years of freelancing with James I find it’s a good way to show your experience, on platforms like Upwork where you can make yourself a reputation and once you have it, degree or not it won’t matter, only your Upwork profile will matter. The good thing is: No one one Upwork will ask for your degree when you start, at least I didn’t see anyone asking for it so far. So to me freelancing platforms are a great way to “show off” your skills and make your first steps.

I’m sure if James and I took the route of going straight to a full time job we would have struggled much more since we had very little to show (Moocs and co doesn’t resonate well to recruiters

Dear @Ekami

I am seriously considering upwork after your suggestion. Thank you for sharing your experience with us Especially when it seems, freelancing comes with almost no problems that I mentioned in my previous rant.

And that led me to check your work history in upwork and @jamesrequa upwork profile. Hats off to both of you You’ve made a truly impressive profile out there. Especially to note that James has no programming experience before switching to DL self-learning in Udacity and Fastai. Very inspiring!

Perhaps searching for a DL job is not the way to go. It seems freelancing works better, and I think it is indeed the future. Win-win for both parties. Less expenses and more agility/flexibility for the corporate side and better pay for the freelancer. Of course I can see the drawbacks too (mainly the instability of the income while job is a more secure option). But providing all the issues mentioned in this excellent thread (thanks @radek ), maybe this is something we should at least try, after all.

I am genuinely interested in your experience in the freelance world and appreciate, if you or @jamesrequa or anybody who tried freelancing platforms before to share the experience in the freelancing “non-slavery” approach to work for a living in DL:

1. Do you consider your freelancing job income stable enough to make it as a primary source of income for a living?

2. Did you use fastai or even pytorch in your freelancing project?

3. When you create a proposal for an upwork client, do you specify the framework type whether it is Pytorch/fastai or Tensorflow?

4. Upwork and other freelancing platforms are highly competitive. What are the main points that you should emphasize on in your proposal to win the contract?

5. What are the pros and especially what are the cons of freelancing in upwork or other platforms in general?

6. Any advice for your siblings in the fastai family, on how to begin and what to avoid or any take away from your past experience in freelancing?

I can see from your upwork profile that you are an Android developer. I have quite a bit of Android dev experience too in the last couple of years (so far 11 apps, 250K downloads, 4.8⋆ and ~3K reviews, which is not quite impressive for freelancing, but planning for a better future moonshot project). So this is something that I have considered seriously as my primary job search after discovering all the issues with ML jobs.

1. Why you have not considered to emphasize on Android app development too, beside your DL portfolios in upwork? Two professions should be better in upwork jobs hunting, no?

2. If you had to choose either Android dev or DL and not both, why you had preferred DL over Android dev.? If you would had to take the ordinary job route, would be your choice different?

3. Did you ever try to take a project for mobile DL model deployment? Since this would be a prefect match to your expertise as Android + DL which I think, not many freelancers possess, and you could charge even more for niche applications like this…

Thanks again for the heads up. Hopefully your post will inspire many to pursue a better way to approach DL jobs