- Whether you're an associate or full-time ML developer at this firm, you will work as a consultant rather than an engineer. Rather than working on Jira tickets or GitHub issues, you're going to be preparing for presentations and trying to figure out what the client wants. - Lack of deep expertise in areas in and related to ML. This company does not run its own infrastructure much less maintain a codebase, nor do they contribute to research or open source. They mostly work with companies in Alberta (mostly in manufacturing, mining, oil, etc.) that heard about ML because everyone else is talking about it and wants to hop on the bandwagon. The projects being worked on are either very basic applications of ML (more so statistical curve fitting than anything related to the current state of the art) or just data visualization projects with some kind of data analysis. - Obnoxious clients. If you're working as an associate, you'll be placed into groups and assigned to one of the companies AltaML is working with. From personal experience and from speaking with others in the program, whether your project is even solvable with ML or is actually a data engineering/data visualization project cannot be said for certain. Clients won't know anything about the subject matter outside of what their company wants, but they'll still have preferences on the technical side of the project due to their statistics background or something. Like seriously, we all know that if you knew how to solve the problem, you probably wouldn't be wasting time trying to get interns to build it. Overall, this company is only alive due to the connections held at the executive level and handouts from the government who are desperate to clog the brain drain of technical talent to the south. If you have technical experience, you'll be better off going to any other startup that's actually building a product lest you waste years as a consultant.
