Human Language Technology: Q4 Update and Thoughts on the Current Job Market
Hi everyone,
Due to recent travels, I didn't get a chance to finish up a post on the series of building and sharing natural language processing (NLP) applications easily.
Since I don’t like skipping a regular weekly schedule, I decided to write a short post outlining plans for this quarter (until the end of the year) and also my thoughts on the current job market in natural language processing (NLP).
We will be back to the regular schedule starting next week.
Q4 Update
There are only 9 weeks remaining until the end of the year. Not counting the last week of Christmas, I will publish 8 more posts till the end of the year.
Based on the current hiring market (more on that below) and the general slow-down in hiring till next year, it would be a good time to focus on polishing NLP skills. I will be doubling down on posting technical content that will help you improve practical NLP skills that will be useful for landing an NLP job and building NLP-based software as a service (SaaS).
To get a taste of what is coming, check out recent two newsletter posts along this direction:
Thoughts on the Current Job Market
It is no secret, that all of the major economies around the world are in the decline. This means that the companies start tightening up their budget to better prepare for the uncertainties ahead.
Did the slowdown reflect on the NLP job market? Absolutely.
Based on my conversations with multiple NLP engineers from the industry and those who are thinking of switching companies, many large tech companies placed a hiring freeze. Of course, there are always exceptions for certain teams and certain positions, but in general, it is not a good time to be interviewing with a large tech company for an NLP engineer job.
Well-funded startups with natural language processing at their core are still hiring (like cohere, adept, neuralspace, jasper, and many more). Plus there is a lot of hype now about generative AI (text-to-image models), which means that there will be more funding for startups that use NLP at its core.
Avi made a list of websites to look for a remote NLP engineer position. Check it out:
Does it mean that the NLP engineer job is no longer lucrative and hiring won’t return? No doubt hiring will come back to a higher pace than it is now.
If we zoom out, we see that current NLP technologies like Transformer, GPT-3, prompt engineering, HuggingFace, etc. were not even around a few years ago. Human Language Technology is at its nascent times, and I expect it to grow and find more practical use cases in the future.
People will continue using NLP-based software that automates tasks like data entry, form filling, knowledge management, and so on. I see the NLP future being bright, and that’s part of the reason I started this newsletter educating my readers on this technology.
That’s a wrap for this week.
I also created a “Getting Started“ guide for this newsletter, organizing all the posts into relevant topics and posting readers’ testimonials.
As always thanks for reading and subscribing to my newsletter. Please share the word about this newsletter with others if you think that they will find it useful.
See you next week!
Really looking forward to what you have coming down the pipeline.
Do you envision hiring picking up at the start of next year or is it too early to tell?
Should we be focusing our efforts on startups going forward? From what you know of startups in NLP is there a particular type of candidate they lean towards or is it more of a case-by-case basis sort of thing?
Sorry about all the questions. I’m newish to the industry and really hoping to break into this space in the next few months. I want to do all I can to position myself to do just that.