There's no competition between linguistics and ML/NLP, they have completely different goals as fields.

I meant that my linguistics background helps me understand & solve problems: studying linguistic field work has helped me design crowd labeling jobs, knowing about morphology helps me understand why BPE tokenizers work so well (and when they might not), knowing about syntax/dominant word order makes me think that multilingual Bert should probably do something more intelligent with positional embeddings, methods from psycholinguistics are useful for understanding entropy/surprisal wrt LM next-word probabilities... just a few examples but the list could go on.