[jp57]

“Bridging the gap between PhD and SWE” would be a good subtitle for my career.

I started out writing software for scientists, psychologists, first at a university, then a small company. After eight years of that I went to grad school and got a PhD in CS (ML/AI), and did a postdoc, before going into industry, and eventually landed a role in what was then called “data mining”, later “data science”, then “machine learning engineering”. In the beginning when the team was small, we were all generalists, doing both the science work and the engineering. As we grew, specialized roles developed, but I was able to chart a course somewhere between a SWE and a scientist, doing a lot of knowledge work, experiments, measurement, and presentation, but also building common tools that the rest of the team can use.

I’ve been out of the job market for 15 years now, but I think any company that does science and builds software would value your skillset. In fact, when I was shifting from academia to industry, I started out determined to be a “scientist”. After all, what was my PhD for, anyway? But my SWE chops were pretty evident on my resume, and I had a hard time getting traction. Then I got brought in for an interview at a company that had a team of scientists and a team of engineers and they brought me in for a split interview with both teams. It was clear by the end that they wanted me as an engineer, but I was insistent on wanting to be a scientist. They didn’t offer me a job, and I was disappointed. The disappointment was educational for me, and I rewrote my resume to put more emphasis on my SWE skills, and that made it easier to find a role that fit me.

[sheepscreek]

> I’ve been out of the job market for 15 years now

Wow - that's a long time at one company, or being without a job. Could you share more on that? Simple curiosity, thanks.

[jp57]

I've been at the same company, and in the same team/dept for all that time. When I started I was in my early 40s with a family and had moved three times in the previous four years, and I was certainly ready to stay put if I liked the job. It turned out that the job was great. We were a small and scrappy team, fighting for recognition in a big company, and we got the recognition and grew explosively. The comp and benefits were good, and the management humane. The growth meant I had opportunities to do new things. I became a tech lead and then a manager. As a manager, I got to see how comp, and promotion, and hiring, and firing worked. And I got a lot more empathy in general for the work that management does that ICs generally never see.

After a few years I got tired and somewhat bored with being a manager, and asked my director to move back to a senior IC role and he facilitated that for me.

TBH, I have always had my doubts about the narrative that short tenures are the norm in tech. It has always sounded to me like a misreading of the statistical distribution: if you were to histogram the length of tenure of every job (person+company) in tech over some period, of course there would be a big hump at the left end. That's natural, because they are short. I myself have three jobs of less than two years and one each of six, eight, and 15 (if you count grad school as a job). So that's 12 years in the the four shorter stints and 23 in the two longer ones.

[ecophyseis]

I went through something similar. Ended up under-emphasizing my science background because I noticed that it turned people off.

[jp57]

You don't say what it means for you to have under-emphasized it, or what the consequences were, but my changes mostly consisted of changing the preamble of my resume to be clearer that I was willing to take dev jobs, though I was really only likely to apply in "sciency" roles.

When I said I was disappointed when I didn't get the job in the story above, what I meant was that I was disappointed that they didn't offer me the SWE job, and I kicked myself for telling them I didn't want it. But really I only knew that I wanted it after I didn't get it.