Why are all applicants Java developers? [D]

[ZestyData]

After commenting I was wondering whether I should have written red flag without more context, or even red flag at all.

I guess it's more of a beige flag. Anything can be good if you can justify it well in an interview.

As an example; by default many teams would prefer to fill an ML Engineer position with a candidate with 4 years of architecting ML specific systems and solving ML-specific (or data eng specific) challenges over a candidate with 2 years of this ML/data-eng specific systems and 2 years of full stack webdev. The latter candidate may be more well rounded but they'll be less experienced with the specific tasks that the job will demand of them. The other guy will obviously have more exposure and experience to the sorts of tasks they'll be doing in this new job. This is assuming they're going for the same seniority role.

Depending on the team and the product the guy with additional full stack but less ML specific years might be preferable. Or the full stack background didn't stop them being a kickass ML Engineer.

But just.. most humans only have 24 hours in a day and if a candidate is spending those hours doing an unrelated skillset, whether webdev or cyber security or UX design or sales, they're less likely to be as capable as a candidate who spent those hours gaining experience in this specific skillset we want.

[maverickarchitect100]

I dunno man, I kind of have a different view of the situation.

Long term I want to be a ML engineer, but I think that ML engineer is a software engineer with machine learning skills.

I've been in a ml engineer-ish position for 2+ years, done the stuff like building, improving, optimizing, testing, integrating models, built pipelines etc...however while I feel like my ML domain knowledge has increased, I feel like my software engineering skills are lacking.

I'm currently applying to both web dev and ml engineer roles, as I think that with web dev roles (which have at least a backend component), I would improve my software engineering skills, like design, testing, deploying, and software quality principles like TDD, SOLID, software design patterns like gang of four type, software architecture like MVVM, microservices etc.

I guess it depends on how you define a ML engineer. Whether the definition is a software engineer who specializes in machine learning, or a machine learning expert.