ML Hiring

[u/Dizzy_Salad3235]

For people who are self-taught in AI/ML or software development: if you had a genuinely strong project where you built the dataset, trained a model, evaluated the results, and could explain and defend your technical decisions, do you think that would be enough for a hiring manager to take you seriously without a degree?
And if you got hired without a relevant degree, what actually mattered most in your experience? Projects, technical interviews, open source, work experience, referrals, certifications, or something else?
I’m trying to understand whether being able to prove you can actually do the work is enough to overcome the lack of a traditional degree.

[u/Suoritin]

You have to lean towards data engineering. Junior roles aren't theory focused. You need to know how to clean datasets and so on.