Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbctol | Hacker News Reader

You may not need a PhD or tons of experience to learn Deep Learning, but what about the gap between that and getting a job?

View on HN

If you are a great software engineer that can solve hard problems yourself, and then you add to that real experience solving your own nontrivial problems with DL, then people will hire with no questions asked. The reason is that not many people have experience in DL. So companies need to get good engineers that have the problem solving mindset and motivation+creativity to learn new frameworks and lick the problems they face in new awesome ways. Industry is dying for people like that.

If you are that type of person then you can kill it with just a few weeks of hard study on your own.

> If you are a great software engineer that can solve hard problems yourself [...] then people will hire with no questions asked.

False. Being a great software engineer is not enough to get a job in deep learning. For the same price, or a little more, you can hire an "expert" scientist or engineer with a PhD in CS/stats/ML.

Good point. Should probably say "you'll get an interview". I think you snipped out something pretty important though. The fact that you have done something nontrivial with DL is actually a big tell for the employer. If you just 'want to learn more about DL because it seems interesting' then employers aren't interested. But if you say "I am a good engineer and I have already done something nontrivial" then you have a much better chance of getting an interview and then the job.

This probably assumes you're willing to get a job in SV, NYC, Chicago, or Seattle. I doubt I could spend months learning deep learning and have any decent chance of a job in San Antonio (Texas). I don't live there - just an example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com