Will Machine Learning Engineers be extinct by 2030? 🤔

My face when I read that Machine Learning Engineers will be extinct in 10 years 😐

First of all, when did you get the idea that the Machine Learning Engineer as such existed? It has always been a part of a software engineer’s toolkit.

Think about it, the title as such had only been showing in the market for a few years. In fact, who cares about the title, call it Statistician, Advanced Analytics, Advanced Statistics, Statistics, Data Scientist... call it whatever you prefer, you most likely will be having the ML skills regardless. You had it, you have it, and you will still have it in the future.

I don’t understand why people want to keep generating misinformed content. In the 1950s it was not called ML, but developers were still making computer programs that would emulate ML features. What about those amazing libraries that make researchers’ life easier? I am going to tell you a secret: researchers + software engineers 😱

What are you talking about? You might be wondering... what I am trying to say is that most of the ML enthusiasts that I encounter are focusing exclusively in learning ML algorithms only or trying to memorize all those cool ML libraries.

Before I got the position I am covering right now, I always knew what most part of the job would be: software development. Yes, I do cool stuff like integrating ML into computer programs, I build custom ML libraries... what did you think a ML engineer does? Do you think you are just going to be hired to apply supervised learning algos to data? -> that’s the wrong path then, it’s definitely not ML engineering.

In my opinion, you need to have a very strong background in programming and computer systems and the ML part can come before or after, doesn’t really matter. And those skills required in the past, are required in the present and will be required in the future. It is not that we will be extinct, it’s just that people are using the term wrong and dreaming about a position that has never existed and will never exist!

I got emotional with this topic, I know. Cheers.

What’s your opinion?

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