[aspectmin]

Okay. I’ll throw in. I live in the Pacific Northwest and have been in tech a long time, about the last 4/5 years with a heavy focus on data science and ML with a particular focus on cyber security (and robotics/IOT (think like datacenter energy system monitoring). Not a PhD. Pretty much self taught. Worked for one of the big tech companies for many years, which gave me a lot of cred to build on (and a great platform/environment to focus on learning).

When I bill hourly, it’s somewhere around the 200-250 USD range, but I much prefer to bid by the project. I also do a fair number of talks around machine learning/security, AI and the future of work, and consult with policy makers on the impact of tech (esp. AI) to jobs and rural workforces. The latter generates me significantly more revenue than the hourly billing.

As to the projects themselves, to use the adage, ML is probably less than 10% (maybe even 5%) of the actual projects. Most of the work is finding the data, cleaning, and doing things like figuring out how to get their IOT devices regularly reporting to the cloud or Messing with things like SNMP and monitoring infrastructure.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ping if questions.

[cw_ds]

The robotics/iot stuff is a pretty heavy interest for me. Where did you start, being self-taught, to get into the field? Or was working at a tech co enough already