if im a below average web developer of 15 years and wanted to transition to entry level ML/AI engineer of any sort, how much time would you guess it would take to become a competitive candidate if i worked at it full time? i'm intelligent but just completely declined to apply myself more to web dev, which is why i sucked at it.

i've been unemployed for two years and it's hard to find anything i can do with my background that isn't "software engineer". entry level stuff for adjacent things like project or product management simply aren't available. exploring options like data science seems to show that area is also extremely competitive and the job market is terrible.

i really do not want to grind leetcode for the sake of yet another job plumbing CRUD apps together, but i could see myself learning a new domain and following through with that because the end result would be worth it/interesting

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mumbisChungo 5 days ago | parent [-]

AI/ML dev is just boring old SWE but now you've got some new ingredients in the mix.

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93po 5 days ago | parent [-]

i think my hope is that interviews for ML engineering would focus on domain knowledge specific to ML and not intricate questions about using typescript and react, which is the sort of stuff i simply cannot bring myself to care about enough to memorize well enough to discuss well in an interview

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skydhash 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The premise is a basic understanding of matrices and stats. Then go through a course on machine learning (supervized, unsupervised, deep and reinforcement learning). That’s for the theory. Easy if you know your math and python.

The practical side is endless tweaking of the data and the models. And keeping yourself informed about new models and techniques (throug scientific papers)

	▲	93po 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		thanks! i think i understand the nature of the job okay, i think its more my ability to realistically get there in 6-12 months is what i'm concerned about

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imsaw 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Exploring Kaggle and participating in ML competitions is an excellent way of getting hands on experience.