To give a bit of a background, I joined big N company for a bit over an year now for an ml research position, after finishing grad school and having some moderate success in academic research.

During my time here my team has been involved in 3 projects. And results have ranged from failure to success that hardly resulted from researching ml. time put into ml optimization resulting in only marginal improvements, and most actual value coming from unrelated stuff. Currently, even though our evaluations seem to be pretty good I think I am not bringing all that much value to the company. I really hope that I’ve had a rough start and it gets better, but wanted to hear others experiences.