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I agree. I did my degree at a top 10 university in the world. Bachelor mixed, Master focused on AI. All I can say is, the job market for data science, machine learning engineering and similar is heavily overcrowded. This means that due to competition (lots of supply, not so much demand) salaries will be (a lot) lower than e.g. software engineering. I didn't even bother going into the field, I heard enough horror stories from friends. Several of which got into high prestigious AI companies, for which they had to pass 6+ very challenging interviews and compete against hundreds or thousands of other candidates to get in. Yet, they get paid peanuts compared to what I now rake in as an SWE. When I do 6+ challenging interviews with a company for an SWE job, the least I (can realistically) expect is a TC of > $160k. Sure, there's these mythical $500k+ salaries for data science / machine learning as well, but they are a lot rarer than for SWE, simply because the market is much smaller for them. So you're playing the game of trying to become a famous football player, where only the top of the top get dream contracts, the rest not in a long shot. Money is not everything, true, but at some point you have to ask yourself what's worth more; chasing an elusive dream of meaning or focusing a little bit on your well-being as well. I don't necessarily regret focusing on AI, but from a pragmatic point of view, I rather should have taken a couple more systems and cloud computing classes in hindsight. |