AMA 🎙️: Hi, I am diffusedbandit, Senior ML Engineer at an Indian Unicorn

1. 60 LPA
2. What companies in india have IPOd? I have ESOPs but I value them as 0. Invest in parag parekh flexi cap folks for wealth creation! 3& 4. No lateral moves, I see myself as a product owner (owning not just ml) in the future. I absolutely love the kind of shit companies around me do.

A simple exploration on growws mutual fund comparison reveals quant active and even quant tax plan have consistently outperformed parag Parikh by a long margin

With seniority, part of my day goes into meetings - discussions around what is it that we are building, progress checks, brainstorming around what to build next, PRD etc. I also have the added on responsibility of a team lead, where I have to delegate work and ensure timelines are met - in other words - do standups and unblock people. I try to dedicate the rest of the time for coding purposes. Some days hacking things together in a jupyter notebook, other times deploying some change, some days integrating the ML stuff with our backends.

Again, not many people have the role I do, where I have to and can make contributions to model building, production deployment and planning. So the above stuff varies for others around me where some do more hardcore model building & analysis

On question 2,

Gen AI is truly a game changer, ChatGPT, Copilot & the likes enable everyone to ship faster. Designers around me use the Adobe beta image gen functions for their work. I have seen some backend folks generate code from tools like locify from a figma mockup.

Rewording one of the popular sentiments around the recent developments - Gen AI enables the experts to be more efficient.

Twitter!! I can share later the accounts you have to follow to be uptodate. But that's the only platform you have to be on to be aware of what is happening.

Please share the accounts links

Strangely DSA is something that is never ever useful but rated super highly in your interviews. I would recommend for freshers to continue the leetcode bullshit, and build side projects around to showcase your ML capabilities. Get on twitter and start getting inspired by indie developers hacking things together.

Any company looking at your online work would love to have you, as this separates you from the 1000s of others who also "want" to do AI and fancy shit

Ah thats a bit sad...This screening is very worthless I feel and considering the ongoing internships in hand(ML intern @Siemens, AI Product intern at a Startup) it becomes difficult to practice DSA(and frankly I don't like it I'd rather want to experiment with a new model). I've even won Smart India Hackathon'22 and also participated in many other hackathons have other hands on experiences too but just the notion that you've to go through that DSA round despite dev skills crushes me. Can't complain much , have to learn it the hard way :( Still hopeful and working hard 💪
Thankyou.

I personally would do what Thiel does as soon as I get that rich. Which is to sponsor people to drop out from the colleges/universities. Because they are truly waste of your time if your ambition or goal is something else / bigger.

By goal - if your goal is to do heavy research then yes, phd & masters is the way, you can get yourself into google and the likes and get something massive out. But if your goal is to be the data scientist at udaan, I don't think you need masters or phd for that

Having said that I can see why an employer would prefer a masters & phd candidate over a undergrad with some experience.

What if the person wants to get the international exposure but can't due to not being from tier 1&2 colleges

Definetly a wave, in the context that many companies will come and get popular and die right away.

But the difference this time is, Gen AI is backed into everything now, because it is that good & useful.

Gen AI for images in Adobe, the features around text generation in grammerly, docs, notion (everywhere).

I do not believe in no code BS tools, and I do not beleive anyone saying write a text and get a website out, this is not how things work at any minimal scale, but a developer can now do work that a team of developers could do a year ago.

Same goes for every other profession that has these advances.

Thanks for that reply @diffusedbandit; glad that your views echo Curious: So far in your role have there been any changes? Or is it mainly other functions that are getting better because of easier text/image/video generation

+1

different companies, different hiring managers, different philosophies and expectations from the perfect candidate.

I would always let my work get me my next job than my degree, because of my biases.

Everything. My role has me prototype faster. So huggingface abstractions wherever available, tensorflow serving / torch serve (yes that too) for things like encoder model deployments. For usecases with user data (read big data), PySpark.

I have not seen diversity around what thing people use around me. At the end of the day it is still python and some python packages. And then you go to prod, where things change

say a user modelling problem, like recommending posts to a user on grapevine - one could make a case that simple recency + affinity based models could work. you could take up LR next to solve it and so on.

then say a text classification task, moderating say grapevine posts, hypothetically, I could see using an LLM based prompt engineering based classification model.

Companies in bangalore I do not see anyone sponsoring your pay to make a foundation model, they need you to execute faster, that usually implies that you won't learn as much but rather apply more and more

Nice answer. I think mostly execution is needed and accuracy up to +30% Works too, as compared to linear models.

Have you never thought of going to Algorithmic Trading side ? Higher pay is there

I have not met many 10 year DS folks. But this question is quite difficult to answer.

Companies like sharechat or walmart have different bands, companies like Infosys have different bands. You might work on the same tech but it really depends where you work.

For a product based company , what one can expect ,? A range could help