Hi everyone! @radek: thanks a lot for starting this thread. I think that’s a very important issue to discuss. @ everyone else: thanks for sharing your stories. I decided to share mine as well.
I fall exactly into the problematic category that Radek mentioned. I’m neither a domain-expert learning to code nor a software engineer getting practical ML experience. During my master’s degree in Economics I programmed for the first time in my life at age 25 (very basic statistical analyses in R). After graduating I started to work as a project manager in Business Intelligence and while I liked the job, I really missed the practical experience of building stuff myself. So I set out to learn Python in Datacamp and did some (rather unnecessary) ML courses on Udemy. A big game changer for me was taking the deeplearning.ai specialization, which really got me hooked on deep learning. However, when I tried to start my first project after the course and sat in front of an empty Jupyter notebook, I really didn’t know where and how to start which made me question the whole self-education thing and got me to the point of stopping. I’m glad I didn’t give up though, because then I decided to check out fastai and that’s when things started to change for me.
At this point I had already been talking to my boss for a while about changing my position and after some time he agreed to start a new project that involves NLP and ML where I would be in charge of the entire data science work. So parallely with taking the fastai DL course part 1 I started applying the
very same methods in my own work project. Because I was the entire “Data Science team” in the company, my learning curve was incredibly steep and hard to climb, but after all the project turned into a success.
I also want to briefly talk about locations. I live in Prague, Czech Republic, so I am not located in an international tech hotspot like San Francisco or London. I would be open to remote work, but I prefer to work locally. I think it can even be an advantage for outsiders to work in places other than the well known hotspots. While there aren’t that many job offers available, also the competition on the labor market is much lower. And since more and more traditional companies are willing to try out AI, such places might be good for outsiders to get into the field.
Of course this way won’t be possible for everyone and I also consider myself very lucky, but I wanted to share my story because it may show another option for folks who want to land their first data science job. If you have a good relationship with your boss, you can try to convince him/her to let you try out a project that involves ML (maybe part-time or even on your own time). Choose a small project that is likely to succeed because you most likely will only have one shot of convincing your boss.