You won’t know how to do everything. No body knows how to do everything. Even then, all the ML people I work with have PhDs except those of us in MLops who all have masters. However I work at a high profile company so my experience may be different.

You should find a GitHub repo, like tinygrad, and make contributions to it. Eventually, your work will speak for itself and you’d be much better positioned to land a job. If after finding several repos to try to make contributions to, you find yourself not able to make such contributions, take an honest assessment of your skills and set goals to improve the areas you need to improve. I’ve been working for several years in this area and would never dare something like “knowing how to do everything”. Be specific about what you know how to do. Maybe you’re just trollin’ us.

I see a couple other comments saying it will be hard to crack the first job, but easier to have a career thereafter. I don’t think that’s realistic. My company won’t hire anyone for any corporate roles without a degree. Even if I wanted to take a chance on someone without a degree for my team, we don’t allow that at the company level. The companies that do allow hiring non-degree candidates, I suspect, will often prefer the degree-holding candidates if they’re available.

someone on data science just posted they received a $120k post grad job offer and they don’t know anything about data science. so sure. why not go for it

If you are able to get to such a good level in ML in 6 months, something which requires years, you really shouldn’t have a problem getting any job.

the fact that u think “u know how to do everything” is already a big red flag

OP, if you’re serious about wanting an ML-related job and skipping the education part, look for any data job to start, to get your foot in the door. Get work experience in the field.

Aside, there’s many things you can do to demonstrate your abilities.

• Work on interesting personal projects to build a portfolio to showcase. Interesting is in bold, because I suggest avoiding popular datasets like the Titanic one or the Housing market one - pick something to set you apart.
• You could enter Kaggle competitions and be very active on the platform. Not sure how much this would help get a job, but more experience is always positive.
• Alternatively, I’ve read that upworks can be a good place to start looking for independent projects. I’m not super familiar with the platform though.
• As someone else said, participate in the open source communities with contributions. That will demonstrate your skills and perhaps help you network with others in the field.
• Get certifications from respected platforms. Ie. Google cloud, AWS certs, etc.

The field is very difficult right now, and upskilling always needed. So being able to self teach and keep up to date is always gonna be positive.

One thing I would say though, is self-reflect on what you know and don’t know. When you say you “Know how to do everything”, that’s a red flag for many people - a lack of self awareness can result in critical errors and a lack of productivity. When you can admit the flaws in your work, it’s much easier to ask for help from others and use these opportunities to grow. It’s a good skill to develop and imo makes one a better learner and a better person to collaborate with.

That said, good luck achieving your goals! This field is pretty exciting right now!