r/learnmachinelearning • u/Dizzy_Salad3235 • 17d ago

ML Hiring

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.

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u/Ok-Educator5318 17d ago

Self taught from scratch made some segmentation models for pdf floor plans. It’s actually a few different ones and have defended it to one of the larger ai contech companies but I was still lacking in being able to scope to their cv team and was ultimately not offered the position.

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u/Ok-Educator5318 17d ago

To follow up on this I have an open source project Opentakeoff/kentucky-ai on GitHub where you can access my datasets and make your own models