There’s big data which is like crud mixed with systems programming and some data structures + algorithms. And there’s of course regular systems programming too.

At certain companies there are definitely people who get paid to write compilers or develop frameworks (for any which thing), operating systems, backend cloud tech, robotics, etc. but it would probably be seriously hard to break into this without a CS degree or relevant experience

I agree that most modern programming work boils down to “put this into the database, take this out of the database”. Probably the biggest exceptions in terms of job numbers are embedded, which often requires an electrical engineering degree, and game development.

Is ML even a programming job?

I see it more like data science, 10% programming 90% math.

Edit: 3% programming, 30% math, 67% scrubbing data. Thanks for the correction shortoncash. :)

Most ML jobs are sitting around scrubbing data. The fun math part is like 5% of the job, and usually there's some guy (or a small handful of guys) that's a PhD who is hired to do all of that because he was in the research area before he left academia.

I could be wrong, but this is my experience.

Agreed. We call that team "operations research" and they are all PhDs. The ML devs build the pipelines and deal with engineering concerns around having/moving/securing lots of data.

That too. So how is all computer science not 'web dev' and not a viable career choice? Assuming we are talking about the "right" kind of web dev, I guess.

I think there's a general misuse of terms like AI, Machine Learning, Data science and Data engineer. ML is the new "Big Data"