u/missing-in-idleness

I’m currently working at an IT company and will probably be leaving soon. I’m already talking with companies in banking, IT and consulting, mostly for roles close to my current experience.

But I also got an opportunity at a large factory with a small data science team. From the initial talks, their work seems to be around sensor data, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, safety, maybe some computer vision. They manufacture some machines, so it sounds quite different from my usual IT environment.

Most of my recent work has been around LLMs, agents, GenAI, etc. I know this area pretty well, but I’m not sure I’m passionate about doing mostly that long term because of the hype. I still find things like gradient boosting, computer vision, time series and more traditional ML problems really interesting.

So I’m curious about people who have worked in manufacturing DS/ML. What is the culture and day-to-day work like? Is it generally calmer than IT/consulting, or does production bring its own kind of pressure? How is the work-life balance?

Career-wise, would moving into industrial ML be a risky switch in the current AI market, or could it actually be a good way to build a more specialized ML background? Also, what skills would you recommend learning for this kind of role?

Bit of a rant/question.

I’ve been working in data science/ML for about 6 years and always assumed experience > education after a certain point.

But lately, when I look at applicant insights on job postings, I see a surprisingly large percentage of applicants with Master’s degrees. It’s making me wonder if I’m getting filtered out for not having one, especially for DS/ML roles.

At the same time, doing a Master’s now would mean a pretty significant time and money investment, and with how quickly the field is changing because of AI, I’m not sure the ROI is even there.

For people a few years into their careers: did getting a Master’s actually open doors for you? And for hiring side, does not having one meaningfully hurt a candidate with solid experience, or is it mostly irrelevant after a certain point?

So, I’m an ML engineer with around 7 YOE, mostly working on AI stuff. I’m definitely not some genius-level engineer, but I’d say I’m above average, disciplined, reliable, and generally good at getting things done. I’ve been at this company for almost two years, and honestly, everything seemed to be going fine. My PM was happy, projects were moving, and there were no major issues.

Then, out of nowhere, I got invited to a meeting with HR and around 100 people from my department.

We were told the whole department is being outsourced.

Everyone was given a different retention period depending on how “important” their role was. I got six months. During that time, someone from a large consultancy company in India will be shadowing me, and I’m expected to transfer all my knowledge to them.

The message was basically: “Please be professional and help your replacement.”

If I stay for the full six months and do not leave even one day early, I get a "meh" retention bonus.

And that’s it.

I’ve never gone through something like this before, and I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to approach the next six months. Before this, I was motivated, taking initiative, trying to improve things, and actually caring about the team. Now all of that is gone because the company found a cheaper option overseas.

Is this really all we get in this field?

Now I somehow need to get back to interview-level preparation, which already feels like hell with how crowded the market has become and how quickly everything changes with the AI coding.

I used to genuinely enjoy working in tech, but lately I keep finding myself watching vlogs of people doing completely non-tech jobs and thinking maybe that life looks better.

Is this just a “grass is greener” situation because I’m angry and burned out right now, or is the reality of working in tech actually becoming this bad?

Sorry for the rant.