Don't learn machine learning

Disclaimer: The following is based on my observations of machine learning teams -- not an academic survey of the industry. If you're a developer, you probably have at least a passing interest in machine learning. The concept of algorithms that can teach themselves to make predictions is just kind of… cool. However, if you do decide to study ML and follow the canonical recommendations for getting started, there's a decent chance you'll spend two weeks learning linear algebra and multivariable calculus before giving up. The reason for this is that most introductory material for machine learning isn't geared towards developers, it's geared to ML researchers--and this is an issue for developers who just want to build products with machine learning.