"In fact, the only machine learning program in the world, according to Thrun, is at Carnegie Mellon, which still isn’t churning out talent fast enough to meet the industry’s demand"
While there is a separate department for ML at CMU, many schools have machine learning and/or robotics departments. Suggesting it's the only place to become educated in this stuff is simply false.
It's probably not the only place but they may be way ahead of the others. I recollect attend a robotics workshop in 1998 where Dr. Takeo Kanade (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=136) from CMU gave a presentation of their work on self driving cars and recollect being amazed by their work and their demo video of US coast to coast driving. They have definitely been working on this for a long time and hence may be way ahead of the others.
I graduated from CMU with a CS degree and a specialization in robotics but never seemed to be able to catch the eye of any companies. My female classmates did great, though.
The two statements here may be factually true. 1) You had a hard time. 2) Your female classmates, all else being equal, did better. But there's something unsettling about the implication. Namely, by putting these two assertions together, you suggest that they have something to do with each other, which, given the appallingly low representation of women in all areas of computer science, is obviously not true.
All things weren't equal. The women weren't as qualified so we had to help them catch up. Not sure what kind of help we were supposed to expect from them though. Plenty of white knights to knock us down, though. I haven't worked in any areas of computer science with appalling low representations of women, sorry. Where have you been seeing it?
Every tech company wants equal gender ratios and female CMU grads are usually top tier. Not that the guys are bad either but when you churn out a couple hundred per year it's not as special.
One of my friends got a job I interviewed for without ever interviewing because I told her she knew the interviewer. They were surrounded by people willing to help them find a job and for some reason aren't able to return the favor.
Due to the current climate of race-diversity and gender-equality, there is an incredibly high demand for female employees in fields and jobs that females generally don't go into.
This creates a demand for ANY-level talent of that variety - no matter the qualifications or abilities (companies will even start a bidding war over the person).
There are even examples of companies openly bragging about not hiring new employees (or at least making it very difficult to do so) that are male and/or white (e.g., GitHub); or not using suppliers that are male and/or white (e.g., Sam's Club CEO).
My university tells me to just keep looking for a job. They don't offer any other advice. Of course I know I'm supposed to be looking for a job. All I get is suicidal. I thought there would be some sort of help... somewhere. I got a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon University and it was completely worthless and everyone just laughs at me. I worked very hard for years of my life and have absolutely nothing to show for it. All I get is hate and ridicule. Why? Because I want a job? Why is that such a contemptible thing?
While there is a separate department for ML at CMU, many schools have machine learning and/or robotics departments. Suggesting it's the only place to become educated in this stuff is simply false.