A friend of mine invited me for an internship in Tencent today. The job is about data mining. As I was busy preparing for my PhD application, I thanked him.
I heard the news that Tencent Corporation decided to change its structure, to make the company flatter, as Alibaba did in 2015 (news said the idea was coming from Supersell, after a visit of Jack Ma to that north Europe company). What I did not anticipate was that change came so fast. They build a new department and many people are needed, so my friend told me that it’s a good chance. When everything is new, there is a higher chance to make a difference.
It was a pity, for I decided to follow my heard, to be a researcher. First, to be a PhD student.
Between the conversation, my friend said he wanted to learn some knowledge about DM/ML. From my perspective, he is a very good engineer, to be a specialist in the algorithm is not a wise choice for him. Maybe a system architect is better, where algorithm design is needed but not the core part. He agreed with me on that. Another reason is there are too many youths coming to the AI industry. It has been a boom since 2017. Some students from EE or even arts learned some algorithms, like SVM, decision tree, then they began to apply for AI jobs. Can you see bubbles flying? So terrible.
As I learned from industry friends, recommendation system, graph mining (i.e. mining on social network, knowledge graph search), CV and NLP, are what the industry generally needs, and streaming data mining would be a hot area. As a researcher, I always want my research to be useful. I am delighted for what I am doing.
Hope everything is OK.
Categories: Life
