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__lawless t1_j4muji7 wrote

I am a data scientist in one of the FAANGs and feel the same. I went looking for freelance work on some websites, but they pay so little. I would be curious on how to find freelance work too.

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nmfisher t1_j4odkrt wrote

  1. Choose your niche (speech recognition/image classification/LLMs/whatever)
  2. Start your own blog with good* technical content (i.e. not the shovel crap you see on Medium), and see if you can write some guest posts for an existing blog with decent traffic. Open-source your code on GH. Spread on social media.
  3. Give presentations at a few local events and make it clear you're also available for freelancing.

It might take a month or two but people will start contacting you.

* this is important, your blog content/presentation actually has to be worth reading. It doesn't have to be cutting-edge, but it has to be novel enough to convince someone that you have something special to offer. Implementing a lesser-known paper and showing your results is usually a good start (also it teaches you just how hard it is to recreate something based on a paper alone).

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Impressive_Iron_6102 t1_j4q8bpv wrote

Tangential but would you recommend just blacklisting medium and towards datascience? They always reach the top of my google searches and it drains me just reading their articles majority of the time.

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nmfisher t1_j4typw0 wrote

If I was using one of the newer search engines that let you block domains then Medium would definitely be on my blacklist. The signal-to-noise ratio is just way too low.

towardsdatascience might be slightly better but even if you find something worthwhile, it's probably available somewhere else that doesn't clog up your search results.

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Professional-Row9655 t1_j4p9ub8 wrote

Good one. Applies to software engineering practice too or any subfield of IT. On another note what resources you refer to generally to pick a paper for implementation ? Can you share some ?

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nmfisher t1_j4paqfc wrote

Easiest way IMO is to scan the list of papers at the annual conferences in your given field, pick a handful with names that sound interesting, then try and find a paper that's referenced by two or more of them.

That's probably a good place to start - it's been around long enough that it's probably not a flash in the pan, but still "new" enough to be relevant.

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