When you are senior you know that reality is messy. Things break, networks fail, people push bugs and we are supposed to know how to get on with the chaos and keep pushing forward since solving the business problem is more important than anything else. I'd argue that you take a similar view to people management, its also a part of engineering just not the one you like. But its important if it helps solve the business problem. The other view would be managing folks is part of your career, so do your job.
Also I question that you've never seen anything new in the past 5-10 years (not being rude here, I understand that someone with 20years experience has seen plenty already but definitely not everything). For example, how much do you know about deep learning ? Are you on track with the latest trends in our inudstry ? Can you make a list of best practices to follow when building AI systems ? Maybe try looking into new areas for growth. It will be uncomfortable but worth it I think.
Please dont go into gaming. Dont do it to yourself and your family.
Experienced dev here who took a machine learning class and found it interesting. Could I get a position in it now? Would anyone hire a grey-haired ML junior? So far my experience says no, but may be bad luck so far.
“It depends”: what’s your prior experience, what kind of roles interest you, how big is the gap between what you have + a little ML knowledge/side projects?
I’d argue there’s a big need for people with solid fundamental CS, sysadmin, infra skills who can bridge the gap into ML practitioner/researcher understanding. Applications or inference generally are probably easiest to break into, especially if you already have service knowledge. If you want to work on distributed training or kernel/model optimization, you probably need to prove your chops there.
Neoclouds, startups in the AI space, maybe hw vendors are probably good places to look.
I've already kind-of tried some management, in the sense that some of my previous tech-lead positions actually involved managing the team as well. But that's really not something I enjoy or want to do.
> Also I question that you've never seen anything new in the past 5-10 years (not being rude here, I understand that someone with 20years experience has seen plenty already but definitely not everything).
That comment was meant to be in the context of web dev, I'm not pretending to know everything about all areas.
> For example, how much do you know about deep learning ? Are you on track with the latest trends in our inudstry ? Can you make a list of best practices to follow when building AI systems ? Maybe try looking into new areas for growth. It will be uncomfortable but worth it I think.
I have studied deep learning and neural networks, and found-out that it's not something I'm interested to work with. I am more interested into moving down the stack. Maybe systems programming, but also video games, because it involves low level concerns, optimization problems and a huge creative/artistic part. But yeah, I know that working in video games might involve lots of other sacrifices I'm not willing to make.
When you are senior you know that reality is messy. Things break, networks fail, people push bugs and we are supposed to know how to get on with the chaos and keep pushing forward since solving the business problem is more important than anything else. I'd argue that you take a similar view to people management, its also a part of engineering just not the one you like. But its important if it helps solve the business problem. The other view would be managing folks is part of your career, so do your job.
Also I question that you've never seen anything new in the past 5-10 years (not being rude here, I understand that someone with 20years experience has seen plenty already but definitely not everything). For example, how much do you know about deep learning ? Are you on track with the latest trends in our inudstry ? Can you make a list of best practices to follow when building AI systems ? Maybe try looking into new areas for growth. It will be uncomfortable but worth it I think.
Please dont go into gaming. Dont do it to yourself and your family.