Is there a market for competent developers without professional/academic experience in data science or machine learning? Perhaps just a MOOC or some Kaggle projects?
This is what I would like to know as well. I'm a profession dev competent with handling large scale systems. I try to learn ML on my own time but that's not quite as thorough as getting a dedicated degree. I can catch up with the grad students if I put in more time but will an employer see it? Will they take a risk even if I haven't had enough projects in the belt. etc etc