How to find and land a Machine Learning Engineer Internship during the Tech Recession
This post is especially relevant for the current tech recession but these steps will help you land an ML internship even after this period
What I have been up to and word on the street in the machine learning space
Hi all,
I am back from New Orleans, where I spend an entire week attending Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference. It is the largest conference in machine learning and AI. It was great to catch up in person with many acquaintances and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while.
There were lots of interesting technical discussions and presentations at the conference. Everyone was talking about Large Language Models and a new version of GPT called ChatGPT. I will have a separate post on my opinion about ChatGPT later this week.
A topic that was coming up over and over again in the discussions was the Machine Learning Engineer and AI researcher job market. Many students feel frustrated as Big Tech company hiring is frozen, and because of that, they can not cash on their skills. Many AI scientists in Big Tech feel uncertain about their future job prospects and are frustrated that they can't grow their team. Everyone is on standby and waiting for things to start moving again.
This recession is a good reminder to have a second income stream to keep you cool, calm, and collected in the downturn. However, having a high-paying career and prospects to land it is equally as important while you are building your second income stream.
Since I see a lot of students in the subscriber list (I see many emails with .edu) I wanted to write my thoughts on how to land a Machine Learning Engineer internship, especially in these recessionary times. I have been lucky to do several internships at a few big tech firms, and I have seen a thing or two about landing these internships.
State of ML engineer internships
TL;DR: Not good as many big hot names have frozen hiring, even for internships. Other less-known places plan to hire interns but fewer people than before.
Yes, the hiring freeze is real, and this time it did not only affect full-time employees but interns as well. I have seen a few Twitter posts over the last few weeks of students posting how they received internship rejections at places like DeepMind, Amazon, etc due to the hiring freeze.
Gone are times when intern hiring was given.
I do think hiring will eventually pick up, but I don’t want people to sit with their hands tucked and wait for good times to come again. Instead, I want my subscribers to proactively prepare and land ML engineer internships next year.