📚How I went from finance → AI
How I went from dead-end financial consulting and no technical skills to machine learning engineering in 5 years, and then to AI research 3 years later.
My guiding principle was to maximize my usefulness - I never planned farther than 6 months ahead. If I'd seen this roadmap in 2012 I probably would've given up immediately and started that pub crawl business.
| Time | Status | Emotions | Do differently |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 Q2 | Graduated with econ degree, 3.1 GPA | Aghast | Things don't just "work out" |
| 2011 Q3 – 2012 Q4 | Job 1: financial consulting | Misery | Everything |
| 2013 Q1 | Web Development curriculum (step 1) | Elation | |
| 2013 Q2 – Q4 | Dev Bootcamp | Obsession | |
| 2013 Q4 | Job 2: Web development | Relief | Find mentors |
| 2014 – 2015 H1 | Stagnation | Frustration | Everything |
| 2015 H2 | Dipping my toes in CS | Revelation | |
| 2015 Q4 – 2017 Q4 | Job 3: Fullstack Engineer | ||
| 2016 Q1 | First attempt at CS Curriculum | Frustration | Ignore unhelpful degrees |
| 2016 Q2 – 2019 H1 (3 years) | CS Curriculum (step 2) | Epiphany | Project sequencing |
| 2016 H2 | Dipping my toes in ML | Curiosity | Sabbatical sooner |
| 2017 H1 – 2019 H1 (2 years) | ML Curriculum (step 3) | Narrow scope | |
| 2017 Q4 | ML sabbatical | Frustration | Better curriculum |
| 2017 Q4 – 2020 Q4 | Job 4: ML Engineer | Imposter | Ask for help |
| 2019 H2 – 2020 H1 | NLP Systems Curriculum | Overconfident | Focus on other bottlenecks |
| 2020 Q1 | CS294 Deep Unsupervised Learning | Challenged | |
| 2020 Q4 – 2021 Q2 | Job 5: ML Researcher | Amazed | Nothing! |
I loved my job as an AI researcher. Research is simply learning the answers to questions that nobody has asked before, so the learning skills I’ve accumulated served me well. But I had no choice but to quit: the Archive had broken up during the pandemic, and I couldn’t stop thinking about starting a community that would last for 50 years instead of 5.
I usually encourage people to start programming if they love to build and could imagine themselves being a programmer for 5+ years.
I generally recommend the Bloom Institute of Technology, because it’s one of the longest bootcamps and because it briefly covers computer science fundamentals. Be advised: you get out of it what you put into it, so prepare yourself like it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.
There are many folks with business skills that want to “learn how to talk to engineers”, learn how to build their own MVPs, or otherwise don’t plan to be a full-time programmer for the bulk of their career. I usually discourage these folks from going to a bootcamp or taking intro to programming courses. Instead, I’d bet on the no-code movement. Here’s a curriculum I prepared for a friend: