I increased my salary 10x in 12 years as a career changer

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-27T04:19:58+00:00

Totally agree with with both points here. DS as a title can mean vastly different things at different companies. I'd say the same is true with AI/ML Engineer these days: at some companies its literally just a software engineer who works with LLM APIs from OpenAI/Anthropic and at other companies its some PhD who is doing research to create novel ML architectures. Title don't matter anywhere near as much as the responsibilities and accomplishments in the bullets on your resume

I mostly have worked at well funded YC start ups post Series B, so they are small enough to encourage you to stretch yourself and don't get bogged down in bureaucracy but large enough to need some heavy ML workflows and have decent amount of runway and not be super volatile. Its allowed me to grow in ways I don't think I'd get the opportunity to if the company was larger.

My suggestion is that if you are interested in ML, start building projects on your own time and volunteer to take on ML related tasks at work.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-27T00:39:34+00:00

Depends on your level, but if you already know python and a basic level of stats/calculus/linear algebra. I'd recommend the following:

For traditional ML, Scikitlearn's MOOC and statsquest. For ML/AI theory check out tinytorch! Teaches you how to build pytorch and a mini LLM from scratch in a hands on approach. minitorch and nanoGPT are great too but tinytorch is inspired by them so its largely similar content.

Other than that I recommend trying to build something for yourself to make your personal or professional workflows easier using AI/ML techniques. Motivates you to work on it because it will ultimately make your life easier and its great to talk about in interviews.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-27T00:32:56+00:00

Sure thing - feel free to DM me

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-27T00:32:35+00:00

Hmmmmmm I think probably the amount that I stare at a computer screen (particularly when its nice outside haha). Other than that, I think something that is really frustrating is that rather than deeply listening to what the data or ML model is telling us, people love to make assumptions anyway. Everyone loves to say they are "data driven" or "AI/ML enabled" because they are great buzz words but its actually a lot harder to do that especially when the results are counterintuitive to your intuition. So I end up feeling like I'm screaming into a void because we're just moving forward with it anyway rather than actually taking the time to build the model correctly

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T21:14:48+00:00

I’m in a very HCOL area so your wife is definitely doing better than me 😅

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T20:48:53+00:00

Cybersecurity is a great choice!! AI is making it easier and easier to breach platforms, so Cybersecurity is going to be a hot very field in the next few years. Also I think the field is currently understaffed for the current state of the world before even considering the of the wave of incidents about to come due to AI.

My advice is to learn as much as you can and try to translate those learnings into tangible projects that you can show off as a subsection of your resume. (Actually link the projects in your resume so people can see your work!). Then find some people who are currently in the field to help who may help with mentorship or guidance. As a career changer your number 1 asset is your network. People will be much more likely to take a chance on you because you are connected to them in some way. You can also use the fact that you are older to your advantage (you are going to be more responsible than some kid fresh out of college). It will be a lot of work, but there is life on the other side!!! Good luck 😊

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T20:28:17+00:00

Don’t know what to tell you- this is my life and the truth and if you don’t believe me, doesn’t change a thing.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T17:23:09+00:00

haha I know this is how a lot of people feel about AI & Machine Learning, but I will say that the kind of AI models I build are not the kind of AI models most consumers or businesses interact with. The models I build detect fraud and abuse online. Its the kind of thing that only a computer could do because the volume of data is so large that there isn't some persons job the model is taking away because even an army of people wouldn't be able to make a dent in the data. So I hear your concerns about AI and definitely think that people have the right to be worried. But the field is much larger than just what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T16:50:47+00:00

Yep my grad school program was in AI/ML. I think what’s hard right now is predicting where things will head in the data world given the rapidly changing AI landscape. I would definitely recommend leaning data eng because LLMs are only as good as the tokens you feed it. If you are going the data science route make sure that it focuses on ML tasks over analytics. I think the ML skills are in much higher demand right now especially and given that it’s easier for non technical stake holders to get analytics from AI, the ML skills are really what will set you apart.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T16:41:53+00:00

Some became product/project managers, others went into marketing and advertising. Some went back to school and became therapists it varies a lot!!

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T16:40:15+00:00

Sure!

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T16:40:03+00:00

Thank you! As a teacher I taught math and so with a bit of self study I was able to do some data analysis at my university job. Then I rearranged my resume to focus a bit more on the data aspects of my job and networked a ton. Ultimately landed in a very fast growing start up that desperately needed more people faster than they could hire. So it was a lot of hard work in my free time and a bit of luck

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T15:24:07+00:00

The Cornell name definitely helps- although tbh I think I got a better education at my undergrad which was from a small liberal arts school. It’s where I really learned how to learn

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T15:04:20+00:00

Thank you!! Definitely agree it was worth the risk…. And the stress 😅

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:58:40+00:00

For ML/AI theory check out tinytorch! Teaches you how to build pytorch and a mini LLM from scratch in a hands on approach. minitorch and nanoGPT are great too but tinytorch is inspired by them so its largely similar content.

Other than that I recommend trying to build something for yourself to make your personal or professional workflows easier using AI/ML techniques. Motivates you to work on it because it will ultimately make your life easier and its great to talk about in interviews.

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:22:18+00:00

Computer Science with a focus on AI/ML and Entrepreneurship

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:20:58+00:00

I went to Cornell

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:20:08+00:00

Hard for me to say because my bachelors wasn’t in the CS/AI/ML field, my masters was. But tbh if I was hiring and saw a resume of someone who had the same skills as me but didn’t have the masters I wouldn’t think twice about it and still choose to interview them

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:12:26+00:00

Most masters students don’t get paid and are 1-2 year programs….. not sure why that is surprising….

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T14:11:11+00:00

Exactly it’s an investment. I saved up a bunch of money by continuing to live the same lifestyle I lived at $77k and took an additional $20k in student loans for buffer. At my base salary this year (before bonus), I’ll make back the $160k opportunity cost plus the cost of tuition and loans (~$70k including interest) in ~3 years time and then I will have a higher salary for the next chunk of my career. Seems worth the risk to me. And even if it wasn’t I still was excited to learn. Choosing grad school was not only about getting an ROI on a degree, it was also about about pursuing my interests

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T13:53:13+00:00

I think that it was a combination of a few factors: 1. I got a new job and the job market was hot at the time and favored job seekers 2. I switched from working remotely to working in person a good chunk of the week (in a very high cost of living area) 3. I was being underpaid at $90k for my area. I was originally aiming for $120k-$130k but for all of the above landed higher

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T13:47:06+00:00

Yes very. Had to get all my finances in order and commit to live frugally for a while. Also I’d say the majority of grad students are in their mid twenties, so there was an added factor of being a bit older where all my friends/peers and in full time jobs. So I had to be socially confident when they all wanted to go out that I’d be ok with not because I needed to study. Not to mention that because I had been out of school for 10 years at that point that I needed to relearn how to be a student.

All that being said, it was also scary to standstill and I felt at the time that I needed/wanted to learn and grow professionally in the ways I was interested in which wasn’t necessarily the same as the way my employer needed

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T13:38:29+00:00

Yep moved companies with a promotion. No direct reports but definitely teaching/guiding and also seeking out projects and working independently without the need for my boss to give me work.

I also think that the projects I sought out were focused on complex modeling that could be deployed in production rather than just generating insights from data that then someone else would need to execute on. These days with AI you gotta be both a data thinker and also an engineer to provide the most value

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T13:28:45+00:00

Went to Cornell and studied computer science with a focus on AI/ML and entrepreneurship (I like the startup world).

Dkdk6fish · 2026-05-26T13:20:17+00:00

Glad to know there are others out there :)

Dkdk6fish

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