I've applied for a total of 10 development jobs in my life:

- 7 lead to interviews
- Of those 7, 4 was a good fit for me
- Of those 4, 3 offered me the job
- In all 3 cases, I negotiated a better deal

🧵 on what worked for me and what YOU can do to get similar results 👇

Can you get a job in data science and machine learning without a college degree?

🧵👇

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer, keep reading 👇

(Advice from industry experts who I talked to.)

Companies are looking for people who add value.
In order to add value, you'll need skills. Simple as that.

Get the skills to provide value and you'll get the job.

In the age of the internet where everything is pretty much free, why do college degrees matter?

A college degree makes it easier to get the skills to get a job in machine learning or data science.

College degrees also help you make many useful connections and provides many opportunities in the form of internships and whatnot.

College degrees have their own place

1 There's a chasm between an NLP technology that works well in the research lab and something that works for applications that real people use. This was eye-opening when I started my career, and every time I talk to an NLP engineer at @textio, it continues to strike me even now.

2 Research conditions are theoretical and/or idealized. A huge problem for so-called NLP or AI startups with highly credentialed academic founders is that they bring limited knowledge of what it takes to build real products outside the lab.

3 A product is ultimately a thing that people pay for - not just cool technology or user experience. But I’m not even talking about knowledge gaps in go-to-market work. I'm talking purely technical gaps: how you go from science project to performant + delightful user experience.

4 Most commoditized NLP packages solve well-understood problems in standard ways that sacrifice either precision or performance. In a research lab, this is not usually a hard trade-off; in general, no one is using what you make, so performance is less important than precision.

5 In software, when you’re making something for real people to use, these tradeoffs are a big deal. Especially if you’re asking those people to pay for what you’ve made (can’t get away from that pesky GTM thinking). They expect quality, which includes precision AND performance.

Are you planning to learn to Python for machine learning this year?

Here's everything you need to get started.
🧵👇

In this thread we'll look at all the concepts in Python you need to know for machine learning along with free resources to help you out.

All of this is based on my experience of successfully teaching 300+ students how to code using Python.

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You can use many languages for machine learning, why Python?

Because of 2 reasons:
- Comparatively easier to learn than other languages
- Has the biggest and most mature community

This makes Python a no-brainer to learn for machine learning as a beginner.

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These are the absolute basics which you must know about:

- Basic terminal commands
- Basic arithmetic (+,-,/,*)
- Accepting user input
- For & While loops
- Exception handling
- If-Else statements
- Functions, modules & Imports

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Then comes the more tougher concepts which you must know about:

- Object oriented programming in Python:Classes, Objects, Methods
- PIP (Pypi)
- List slicing
- String formatting
- Dictionaries & Tuples
- Managing environments
- Dunder methods like __init__

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