I left AI to do software. Here’s why.

If AI is a superpower, software is the vessel.

Four years ago, I hopped onto the AI bandwagon alongside many others. Today, I’m a software engineer.

Before I tell you why I made the switch, let me give you a quick TL;DR (I wrote a whole article on it here). I graduated college with a Bachelors in Economics in 2017 and joined an investment bank as a management associate. Doing mainly data analyst-related work, I quickly grew bored and decided to learn to code on the side. After acquiring some basic coding skills, I plunged head first into a Masters program with a specialization in AI back in 2018. With some purely academic/toy AI projects up my sleeves, I applied for an AI traineeship program that aims to train individuals up to enterprise level. Somehow, I passed their interview process.

I had no idea how to write code two years ago. Now I’m an AI engineer.

Since then, I’ve been knee deep in the AI industry, working first as an AI engineer building AI Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for SMEs and then transitioned to a MLOps engineer handling model serving infrastructure and deployment pipelines on cloud.

Today, I’m a DevOps engineer, working mainly with low level Kubernetes components on a day-to-day basis.

Now back to the main topic: Why did I choose software engineering?

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this post are personal and belong solely to me. I understand there may be many software engineers that would like to explore the AI field, and that’s why I’m here to present a view coming from the “other” side.

I knew from the start.

The truth is, back in 2020 when I joined the AI accelerator program, the moment I was exposed to tools and best practices like GitHub, CICD, pre-commit hooks, linting, design patterns, etc., I knew this was the path for me. Maybe not then, but eventually.

It was very clear in my mind because I found them more interesting than learning how backpropagation works or evaluating what my AUC of 0.85 meant.

Data science was more of an art than a science, and I clearly wasn’t an artsy kinda guy (and not to mention reading papers were kinda boring!)