Is it really a comeback if it never really arrived?
Four years ago I started this blog with the premise in mind of it working as a motivator of sorts. I am honestly not sure if it ever did that because I still have a mile long list of unfinished projects, and an even longer one of excuses for why they are in that state.
The secondary goal I had was to share my work experience. Basically, I began studying electrical engineering because I was obsessed with guitar effect pedals, and none of my jobs have been anything like that... So what is that like? I never really cracked into this because I updated the blog like 5 times in 4 years.
So let's catch up.
Since January of 2015 I have been working as a software engineer, writing low level to application level software for industrial controllers and asset tracking devices. How did I get here, from my last reported position, making automated test fixtures? Well... it's not really that interesting, but I will break it down.
In the summer of 2013 I was fed up with my job. If my manager had been more interested in managing than ladder climbing, or if I had been more mature, I probably could have changed roles in the company or just cleaned up some of the things that had driven me to the edge. Basically, I caught all of the time critical projects, and for the most part completed them under budget, on time, etc. One of my peers caught all of the low priority projects, was never on time, always blew his budget, and basically turned everything into a Rube Goldberg science fair device that was awful to maintain and caught fire at some point during development. Any time our boss was planning future stuff (capital improvements, hiring decisions, hardware and software standardization, etc.) he would always side with this guy because they went to church together or something. I was sick of it. I was immature, and a victim of internal politics.
To compound this, the other two engineers on our four man team had just left for an aerospace place. Our manager back filled one of them by promoting a technician who was much more doer than thinker, and seemed content to leave the other spot open. I inherited a lot of their work, which led to an exchange where my manager was asking me, an electrical engineer who taught himself enough C to stop programming PICs in assembly, if I could debug a legacy C# application that was "crashing randomly in production". Maybe this was a dare to be great thing. I found and fixed the bug (the app didn't like it when work orders for parts that were not in our manufacturing database were scanned in. Surprise?) in a few hours... But I had to get out of there. There was an opening at the aerospace place, so I applied, interviewed, and started within a month.
This is one of the worst decisions I have ever made. In the interview I was led to believe I would be doing schematic and layout work bringing a bunch of ancient wire wrap boards into the 21st century. That would have been fine. I should have given proper recognition to the red flag impulse I got when the dude interviewing me asked me to interpret a wire diagram that had like... a symbol for a DAQ pin connecting to a relay... because it turns out that was the job. Not even drawing these things from scratch, but copying them out of 5, 10, 15... sometimes even 20 year old drawings. I wrote some AutoCAD macros and impressed people by finishing a job they allotted 80 hours for in two days... Which was nice, but I was back to checking indeed every morning within two months. Getting useful advice out of this job is a subject for another post. It was the longest 14 months of my life.
And it could have been longer. There was program manager at my old job who I had done a lot of work for. When I left he gave me his card and asked me to reach out if I ever needed anything. A job posting went up there for a mid career embedded programmer. My on paper experience didn't line me up for this, but based on the description I knew the group it was in, and I knew the people in that group liked me. While I was at the aerospace hell job I had spent as much time as I could either listening to the Embedded.fm podcast or on edx taking the Embedded Systems Shape the World class. Does this equal 3-5 years working with an RTOS on a cortex-m processor? Not at all, but I had some small projects I had finished at home, and had studied enough stuff to feel like I could speak the language. I reached out, met some guys for lunch, and got lucky when the more experienced candidate they wanted backed out on them to take a higher salary at his current job. It is impossible to thank people for opportunities like this.
So wrapping things up, the biggest piece of advice I have to give from this is: relationships matter.
I am a hard "I" INTJ. I am bad at maintaining relationships with family and friends who I don't see every day via work or living together. Even friends who I work with, but who sit in far away areas of the facility hit me up from time to time with stuff like "do you still work here?". This is bad, and I am working to change it. I wish I could convince myself at 17 how important this is.
Stop by and say hi to college professors during their office hours. email and check in every few months with high school friends. There is probably some way to do this that doesn't come off super weird, but I don't know it because INTJ. The point is that the one relationship I maintained basically by accident and thanks to no effort on my part ended up like... saving my career?
I have a project in mind for blogging that I will unveil in the next week or two. It will be fun!
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