mlquestions

I have a successful career doing regular engineering work at a large SV company. I used to work (albeit not at a super advanced level) on machine learning but it was more expedient working on tractable problems with a clear path to a solution, rather than spending a lot of time on data prep, wrangling various ML algorithms and only sometimes getting somewhere. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the tools, or a bit of both. Now that there's a huge hype cycle very well underway (especially the last 5 years) and tools are getting better (hardware and software), I'm tempted to get back into it.

Do you work on machine learning (in various incarnations incl deep learning) at Google, FB or (Microsoft, Amazon) or smaller cutting edge companies? Are you really enjoying the day to day work, or not? Why? Would you rather have built a track record in a domain involving more "linear" engineering problems with a similarly large impact? Are you a thought leader and rely on deep technical knowledge of statistics and math? Is the 'risk / reward' from a career and personal satisfaction point of view worth the time invested?