I stumbled on a couple of opportunities to do some freelance research on education recently, and quite enjoyed the flexibility. So I asked my client if they had knew anyone who might want my services, or could advice me how to sell my skills for a short contract. Graciously, they pointed me at Vincent Luczkow, an ML consultant.
So I ignored the guy for a month before talking to him, and he gave some pretty good advice. Most of it I had read or thought of before before. But hearing them in one conversation, and as a critique of my stated understanding, clarified things for me. The best strategy would be to get an ML job and then look for freelance work. Which makes sense.
How to do that though, if you've been a NEET for three years? How can you even get an interview? Answer: you peacock credibly demonstrate your skills. Win kaggle contests and publish your winning code. Complete ML projects and make sure your code meets industry standards. Like CI, testing, documentation and so on. Get experience using AWS or any other part of the software firmanent.
What shouldn't you do? Grind leetcode or focus on getting software engineering work over an ML role. Even if you pull of some pretty sweet projects unrelated to ML, unless they're on the level that you could e.g. publish them then they won't do you much good. . Though the network you get by being a programming consultant would be helpful for those with legible ML skills.
So skill wise, number 1 is getting good at making ML models in pytorch. 2, or maybe 3, would be producing professional code. 3, or maybe 2, would be knowing how to use AWS. Yet what of soft skills? Why didn't I discuss them with Vincent.
The answer is that I did, and he claimed soft skills don't trade off in the same way as hard hard skills. You can choose between learning AWS or coding ML models from pytorch primitives for an hour. But you can't trade off between those and practicing soft skills effectively for an hour. There aren't easy opportunities for that kind of tacit knowledge. So why worry about it?
Right now, I think I'll focus on finishing an interpretability project and win some kaggles. Though I'll need to apply for jobs and contracts whilst I'm doing so. Maybe I'll honk around in Eleuther and see if anyone there is willing to hire a NEET. Ah, who am I kidding, of course they will. I just need to show them I'm a goose.