Does my title start from the bottom if I switch specializations?

Posted by romrick4@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 4 comments

I’m a senior engineer with 5.5 years experience total. For my entire career I’ve been in the full stack web dev route with a specialization in Typescript. For the last 3 years I’ve been heavily backend focused with Node+Typescript in AWS environments. If I wanted to join the AI race and get into machine learning would I have to go back to like a mid level role? I know very little about machine learning however I could very much gain some knowledge through a side project or two. But I’m always going to lack that professional experience in ML. Would my overall experience as an engineer count for something or am I always going to be passed up for someone with ML experience?

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4 Comments

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tb5841@reddit

I know someone who made a similar switch, and his own personal projects were a big factor in him keeping the Senior title.

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forgottenHedgehog@reddit

> I know very little about machine learning however I could very much gain some knowledge through a side project or two. You vastly underestimate how disconnected ML is from web dev, unless you only intend to do the plumbing (and even then, there is very limited overlap).

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integralWorker@reddit

Try to look for a role with overlap. I don't mean when an employer wants you to fill two disparate things (ex. Firmware eng + dev ops/release eng) but more like the problem domain would benefit greatly from knowledge of _____ where ______ is something you have experience in. Maybe there's an ML job where the training data benefits from full stack web dev experience, or the architecture of whatever benefits from full stack web experience, ad nauseum. It's like how a control systems firmware developer could be fulfilled by an excellent EE or excellent embedded eng. The former would need to catch up on coding and the latter would need to catch up on control theory but it's likely either person would be able to cross the gap. Of course there's always going to be somebody who "crossed the gap" already, but if every single one of your competitors did that there wouldn't be any new jobs.

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kayakyakr@reddit

The answer is, "it depends" Is your previous experience relevant in the new direction you want to go? Then you may be able to convert easily. Is it entirely new? Then you're probably going to have to scale down, and not only that, you might need help landing a position. It's always going to be better to find a role that you can apply some of your experience to, otherwise you're not going to get in the door.