Thread by @svpino

Many people who want to start with machine learning face a big hurdle:

They think they can't do it at their current company.

But more often than not, this is not the case. This is a thread about things you can do to get past this.

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First, don't worry if your company doesn't have a machine learning engineer position yet.

Look at this as a good opportunity!

Nobody has any expectations about the job yet, so you'll get to set the pace.

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Focus on doing the work. The actual position, title, compensation, and other details will follow later.

Here is where you need to get creative, and these are two different strategies that I've seen working.

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The first strategy is to look at your company's internal processes and find a way to introduce machine learning.

A few examples:

• Can you predict customer churn?
• Can you forecast their revenue?
• Can you improve a marketing campaign?

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Look at every department. Talk to people.

What are they doing? What problems are they facing? What data do they currently have?

Everyone wants somebody else to make their life easier. They will happily open their doors to you.

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If you can't make any progress, it doesn't matter. Nobody was expecting anything, so you learn something and move on.

But what happens if you can crack it and find a better solution?

Things will change really quick for you!

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The second strategy is to find ways to solve part of your own job in a better way.

For example, if you are currently parsing a bunch of text, maybe NLP is helpful.

Or maybe you can use a clever algorithm to optimize a specific process of your application.

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Where can you use the machine learning algorithm that you just learned to replace a clunky piece of the software you are currently building?

No, machine learning is not for everything, but you can certainly change the game if you find a good fit for it.

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There's something similar about these two strategies:

You need to lead the charge, find a good use case, and develop a solution.

This is not easy, but if you pull it off, you'll be changing your future.

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Yes, sometimes, this may be like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

If that's the case, you may want to consider finding a different job that gives you space to apply machine learning.

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Remember that, sooner rather than later, most companies will start incorporating machine learning one way or the other.

They haven't because they need somebody like you to take the initiative and find a good use case.

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Your goal is to have the space to keep learning and the ability to apply all of that in real-life applications.

Sometimes, finding a company that gives you this is what you need, but more often than not, you can make it happen right where you are.

Give it a try!

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