Before I get to the meat of this post, I wanted to say _thank you_ to the community here. I wouldn't be asking you folks this question if you didn't support me when I first joined this forum 11 years ago when I was a teen. THANK YOU for your support!
So, the time has come that I finally am finishing my doctorate in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences (Social Sciences). Now I'm looking for a job working in search engines / ML, or something of the sort. I also hold a B.A. in linguistics, a B.S. in computer eng., and an M.S. in electrical engineering. So I'm qualified for a coding job, but I'm probably not the hottest ticket compared to someone with a Ph.D. in comp sci, straight up. My angle is that I am also a linguist.
At this point I have contacts at Google, Amazon, and eBay. I just got off the phone with someone from eBay who wants to set up phone interviews and I told him that I'd want to go through the process now and defer until my commitments for this fall quarter are over (mid december), but to start the interview process already. I'm not sure what the best algorithm is for finding the best job that will make me the most happy. I'm preparing for my defense in November, and after that I'm free as a bird (single, late twenties, no attachments whatsoever).
Also, I love teaching and having worked as a lecturer for the past four years, so being an academic is a _strong_ option, but frankly making 50k as a post-doc is not something I'd do in lieu of making 120k working for a big tech company, but making 80 as an assistant professor is something I would strongly consider (it's basically being a glorified grad student with lots more money!).
So, my question is what should be my strategy for going through interviews? Which job would you take and why? And for those of you with industry experience, what is it like? If you went through a Ph.D. program, how does it compare with academia?
All this geeking out is about to pay off and I want to do it right!
