lakevieew

This comment describes a real problem for senior engineers who want to explore a new domain. It is impractical for someone with 10+ years of experience to work as an entry level engineer. What other options exist besides completing online course to get experience in that domain?

This is not specific to ML/AI roles. The same problem applies to anyone who wants to explore any of these domains - SRE, DataEng, Backend, Frontend.

Personally, I am a backend engineer who wants to get into ML Infra roles. My current plan is to do these online courses, and hopefully transfer internally to a team working in this area. Only after having real industry experience in this area, look for more opportunities elsewhere.

I am genuinely curious if anyone has better ideas for people in my situation.

You can buy at if you are a Resident-Alien (for tax purposes) in US with a valid SSN. I bought it and I am on a non-immigrant work visa.

A bit tangential to the main point covered in the post.

>> Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck.

I am not sure if I agree with this completely.

I recently watched a Netflix movie "Look both ways" with my wife. The movie shows parallel timelines in which the protagonist despite facing different scenarios ends up with a very similar fate in the end. That movie got me thinking if our life's trajectory is based on a few defining moments, or if it is more about the small decisions we make everyday.

For example, if Amazon/Meta didn't work out for Bezos/Mark, where do you think they would end up. My guess is they would still be running some big successful companies, as founders or CEOs or VPs.

People here on work visa (H1-B) have to go through renewal of their work visa application as it is tied to their employer. This step while being fairly straightforward can add to the inertia in switching jobs.

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to complete. I was shocked and tried hard to not cry during my review. I had never been told earlier that there were any issues with my performance.

This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job.

I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.