[shortrounddev2]

I spent a week learning enough ML to design a recommender system that worked well with my company's use case. I knew enough linear algebra to determine that collaborative filtering with some specifically chosen dimensionality reduction and text vectorization algorithms as well as a strategy for scaling the models across multiple databases would work well for us. The solution was tailored specifically to the type of data we were working with.

When I presented the proposal, nobody read it and the meeting immediately turned to the vp of engineering and the ceo discussing neural networks and some other ML system that they had read about on HN the day before. When I tried to bring collaborative filtering up again, the VP said "I don't know what that is", so obviously he hadn't read the doc that I was assigned to write over the last week