Harsh Reality of AI Jobs No one Tells You|

hello everyone my name is natchita and welcome back to my channel in this video i'm gonna be talking about the harsh reality of ai jobs and this video could be a slightly unpleasant one there might be some harsh tools that you might not like to hear but i hope it's gonna bring a sense of calm and patience amongst people who are trying to get into this field before i start a little bit of introduction about me i am currently working as a computer vision engineer at a startup called abiros for the past 10 months and i make youtube videos on this channel on machine learning ai data science to help people upskill and get into this field as well but as as you are learning this field and as you're trying to upskill yourself and get a job you see a lot of things happening around you you'll see a lot of things on social media which might uh discourage you which might make you feel that you're not doing enough and that is what i'm gonna address in this video so do watch this video till the end i do not want you to leave with the wrong message just by watching a portion of it but i'm gonna be as honest as possible with what i've seen and this all of this that i'm going to be talking about is my personal opinion but this is what i've experienced and i feel it's going to help you a lot as you try to get in this field the first thing that i've talked about on linkedin as well a few months back is the false narrative that some online courses sell i have seen some certain edtech companies as well which have very cringe marketing ads running where they'll convince you that the moment you learn machine learning the moment you learn data science ai jobs are going to be lined up for you however that's simply not the reality because most of the jobs where you get to work as an ai engineer or a machine learning engineer or a natural language processing engineer most of these jobs in good companies would be reserved only for masters or phd degree holders or people with certain experience in this field for freshers who are people with no experience in this it's going to be very hard to get a job in this now again you see people getting placed in top companies straight out of college but you need to look at what roles are getting into so for example if you want to become a machine learning engineer you have to stop thinking about top broad companies like google or facebook because that's not gonna happen getting a job at these top product companies is still doable if the role that you're targeting is let's say a software engineer or a support engineer or a test engineer but for an ai engineer that's simply not going to happen because they have very high thresholds of filtering and most likely most often more often than not you will not have learned something so significant in college that you will be able to add value at these companies in these given rules so most of these times top rat companies are off limits for you and the only real chance i would say you have is that startups now i've made a separate video on the roadmap of getting good enough skills on how to become an ai engineer and search companies search for startups that can get you a job so you can check that out if that's what you're interested in now let's talk about realistic timelines the moment you start learning this field one thing that's there in the back of your mind is how soon can you get a job in this again as i said you you have to put in a lot of work and if i talk about timelines i would probably think even six months from the moment you start is an ambitious uh goal given the fact that you are putting in let's say three to four hours of serious study every day if you're doing it so seriously every single day then six months is an ambitious goal which means that would if you still had a job that would be a great job on your part right because that's still hard if you're an average guy like me who wants to balance things out so for example when i started in my second year i would probably just spend an hour a day someday i wouldn't study at all some days when i had extra bursts of motivation i might end up studying more than an hour in this kind of scenario one to two years is a realistic deadline to get a job in this field and even when you're studying in this way it is still serious study which means whenever you sit to study an hour you're actually upskilling yourself you're keeping a track of how you're learning different things inside ai how you're progressing from one algorithm to the other and you are doing it in a planned manner at least in such a manner i would say one to two year is a good deadline to have so it's so it's not that you start learning today two or three months from now you get a job at a good company which is paying you well you're working as a machine learning engineer that is very very very unrealistic talk the last thing that i want to talk about is unrealistic expectation of salaries and packages you will see some students getting 30 40 lakh packages on social media you will see colleges promoting that on posters although the enhanced salary would be altogether different game would be less than 50 percent of that but that's a complete other discussion it sets unrealistic uh targets for you i would say even if you're getting an 8 to 12 lakh package as a fresher and this is enhanced salary which i'm talking about obviously i would say that's a pretty great salary but for most scenarios if you look at small startups right where you'll be applying and those small startups might be able to give you a chance even as a fresher because a they might be paying less and they would be willing to take a chance on you if you have the right attitude if you have certain amount of projects and certain amount of work that you've done and a lot of small startups which are giving jobs to pressure i've seen normally packages of four to five lakhs per annum and i would say that is not bad i would say that is very good as a fresher without any experience if you're genuinely getting to work on machine learning for example if you're a machine learning engineer or a data scientist you're actually getting to work on projects that are getting pushed into production you're actually able to get a glance at the life cycle of an air product i would say that is very valuable because understand you're in this field for the long run so five six years from now you'll be making big amounts big money in this field if you're skilled enough so in your first year you can afford to compromise on one or two lakhs that is not that big of a deal according to me and in fact what i've seen in my campus placements itself a lot of companies big mncs would give freshers salaries of let's say six to eight lakhs but would not be giving any real work to them you would be sitting where with a single project for two or three months or you you would probably just be spending an hour or two on a daily basis working on real projects and i would say that is more harmful i would prefer a four to five lakh job any day over a eight lakh job where i'm not learning anything new because what you cannot afford at this stage is to get your skills stagnant because if if you're getting six to eight lakhs or a job where you're not learning a lot we're not getting to work on a lot of projects then even from 12 months from now you are not gonna have a lot of job opportunities to switch your job you're not gonna have a leverage with employers but if you're in a four to five lakh job right now where you are getting to work on ai products where you're getting to know the life cycle of how an ai product works and get experience in this field then even 8 to 12 months from now you'll be able to switch into a much better job you'll have a lot of credibility in front of employers and things will only go upward from your first job so the first job in this field is the hardest to crack and you have to be patient with that you have to think about the deadlines that i told you not expected job instantly the moment you start you have learned a little bit of ai and you have to be realistic with the packages and the companies you're targeting and the only way this process is gonna be manageable is if you genuinely enjoy this field which i really hope you do i hope you are fascinated with the kind of applications that you can build using ai and you should be okay with putting in the hard work to upskill yourself in order to build the products that you love so that was all for this video my only goal was to set straight the realities and give you more realistic timelines and targets and encourage you to not fall into pressure because of marketing gimmicks online or just social media hype so that was all so just put in the work be patient and i hope you do well in this field and if you did like this video do like it and subscribe to this channel and i'll see you again in the next video

Channel: Nachiketa Hebbar

Views: 257,981

Keywords: AI jobs for freshers, machine learning engineer, AI job salary, salary for fresher in AI

Id: 5Qnern0rB_U

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2022