Since Februrary this year I am actively looking for a new job. I am currently living in Leipzig, so I mainly look for remote options as Leipzig has only a handful of jobs in my area of expertise, which are all not what I’m looking for (e.g. ML for recommendation systems). On the 21st of February, a keyword search for “Machine Learning Engineer” on indeed yielded <300 open full-time positions for Germany with only 12 fully remote options. On LinkedIn there are 706 results with 247 remote options, of which are 97 entry-level. Not a bad result for the current market situation, but most of these I expect to be unmaintained and a bunch are duplicates. Nonetheless, I applied to some of them where I could see at least some degree of fit in culture and responsibilities.

There are many things that I consider killers of productivity, excitement, and frankly ambitions. One of them I recently got reminded of is the incremental delay - the delay that knows no definitive end, only a point in time where it is decided if the thing that is supposed to happen must be further delayed (again). Two or three iterations of this and you begin to grow indifferent to that thing, you don’t really care anymore if it will happen or not, and you only crave one thing: a final decision. Even if it was really good news or something that benefits me a lot like a promotion - after some delays, I just want it to end.

Working in AI, one of the never ending tasks is to keep up with the state-of-the-art. Everything constantly evolves, from algorithms, architectures, datasets, benchmarks, to companies, competition or regulation, and the lists could go on for much longer. It is even worse if you’re in research as you constantly need to watch out for parallel advancements that might cost you a publication. I only got a small dosage of that dynamic during my Master’s thesis, which ultimately resulted in my decision not to pursue a PhD program for the time being, even though I love doing research.

Hey there! My name is Moritz, I am a recently graduated Machine Learning Engineer from Germany and this is the site I want to use to share experiences, opinions, and information with the world. I am most interested in Computer Vision, NLP, and generative AI of all modalities - both for real world use cases solving actual problems, and also just for fun.

While I sure wish that this could be useful for some, it is more of a writing exercise for myself. In the times of social media monopolies and SEO-optimized AI slop, I do not expect many people to stumble across my articles.