But keep in mind, the VAST majority of those people have only toyed around with ML libraries or frameworks on the most trivial data. There's A LOT of script kiddies right now, that just copy/paste the same tutorials, maybe even publish yet another "How to classify MNIST dataset with NN / SVM / Naive Bayes / etc." on medium or whatever, just to come off as authority.
So while there's a lot more competition, the majority of these don't even meet the minimum standards to get called into interviews.
If you have solid work experience to show for, then that alone should differentiate you from the the masses. Again, a lot of these people have NEVER worked with anything relevant, and can only show you a bunch of tutorials they've followed. IF lucky, they've actually taken on more exciting datasets from sources like Kaggle, and tried to come up with something.
edit: Not to mention the data - I get extremely impressed when someone actually shows a project which involves them collecting data from the wild, wrangling it, and then doing meaningful work.
Too many beginners only work on neat / ready datasets. You'd be surprised how many candidates get completely blindsided when asked to do some trivial tasks on pre-processing data.
So while there's a lot more competition, the majority of these don't even meet the minimum standards to get called into interviews.
If you have solid work experience to show for, then that alone should differentiate you from the the masses. Again, a lot of these people have NEVER worked with anything relevant, and can only show you a bunch of tutorials they've followed. IF lucky, they've actually taken on more exciting datasets from sources like Kaggle, and tried to come up with something.
edit: Not to mention the data - I get extremely impressed when someone actually shows a project which involves them collecting data from the wild, wrangling it, and then doing meaningful work.
Too many beginners only work on neat / ready datasets. You'd be surprised how many candidates get completely blindsided when asked to do some trivial tasks on pre-processing data.