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What Got You Started in Your Career in Engineering?

tariq.ahmad

In the Comments Below:  Let Us Know How You Got Started in Your Career!

 

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” - Steve Jobs

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." - Steve Jobs

One of my favorite speeches of all time was the Stanford commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave toward the end of his life.  Many of you have careers in engineering, and you come to the element14 community, the first online community for engineers, because you have a passion for engineering and technology.  During my first year working on the element14 community, one of the most exciting things that I have been a part of was the Bit by the Bug campaign where you shared what made you fall in love with engineering & technology:

 

     How Were You 'Bit by the Bug' of Engineering & Technology?

 

Your love for engineering and technology is what helps make this community special.  Hopefully, we all are doing something that we enjoy doing, even if everything is not perfect, but we've all had to start from somewhere.   Sometimes, we can go down many paths during the course of our lives and this could involve having to start over.   We're currently working on a webinar that is geared to those people that are just getting started, or perhaps starting over (or again?) down a path that may lead to a new (or different?) career in engineering.image

 

You're Invited to Be a Presenter!

In the past we've focused our career webinars in the past on IoT.   They're still very relevant and worth checking out if you haven't already:

 

 

This time around we would like to do something that speaks about engineering as career.   recently reached out to the top members to see if any of the Top Members  were interested in joining us as a panelist for a webinar on engineering.   I would like to extend this invitation to the rest of the community at large.   During the Project14 livestreams, I found that having members come on as hosts led to a very interesting discussion.  We'd like to do something similar with the upcoming webinar!

 

You don't have to prepare slides, prepare a speech, or prepare statements or anything like that.  Every career path is unique and we want to hear from a number of different perspectives and have a casual conversation on engineering as a career.   You'll have an opportunity to voice your opinion or tell us about your experiences.

 

In the Comments Below:  Let Us Know How You Got Started in Your Career!

 

 

If you are interested in being a presenter for this webinar contact me directly at or comment below to let me know you are interested.

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  • I'm a software engineer - mainly building iOS apps right now, and managing the mobile team, which includes Android.

     

    I got here because I went to university for chemistry image

    I didn't like the university level chemistry, so after the first term I switched to physics.

     

    Being a broke student, I signed up for the physics co-op option, which included paid work terms. However, I was unable to land a physics job, so the coordinator suggested I should just get a job at a local computer place as that would be helpful for any career.

    I ended up loving the software projects I was handed there (as well as the hardware parts of building computers in the late 80s!), so after the summer I switched over to the computer science co-op, and life was suddenly a whole lot easier!

     

    The co-op work terms had me working at a handful of different companies doing various different projects, so it was also a good test to see if it was something I really did want to do going forward.

     

    My first employment out of university was working with early-90s mobile technology (Atari Portfolio), which then led to Apple Newton and a bit of Palm Pilot. I guess I've always been a mobile app developer image

    I did do some work with bigger software and bigger data in the first decade of 2000 - mostly SQL, Java, Javascript, HTML, coupled with business logic to automate the migration of old database software to become network accessible.

     

    After the 2008 recession I lost my job when the insurance company I was working for was sold off, so I did try something completely different for a year: I was a certified energy advisor doing assessments to enable home owners to get government grants for energy efficiency upgrades. Very cool, but I missed the computer work and so went back to software fairly quickly. That's when I bought a MacBook and started building apps.

     

    It's fun to see how others got into their line of work!

     

    Cheers,

    -Nico

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  • I'm a software engineer - mainly building iOS apps right now, and managing the mobile team, which includes Android.

     

    I got here because I went to university for chemistry image

    I didn't like the university level chemistry, so after the first term I switched to physics.

     

    Being a broke student, I signed up for the physics co-op option, which included paid work terms. However, I was unable to land a physics job, so the coordinator suggested I should just get a job at a local computer place as that would be helpful for any career.

    I ended up loving the software projects I was handed there (as well as the hardware parts of building computers in the late 80s!), so after the summer I switched over to the computer science co-op, and life was suddenly a whole lot easier!

     

    The co-op work terms had me working at a handful of different companies doing various different projects, so it was also a good test to see if it was something I really did want to do going forward.

     

    My first employment out of university was working with early-90s mobile technology (Atari Portfolio), which then led to Apple Newton and a bit of Palm Pilot. I guess I've always been a mobile app developer image

    I did do some work with bigger software and bigger data in the first decade of 2000 - mostly SQL, Java, Javascript, HTML, coupled with business logic to automate the migration of old database software to become network accessible.

     

    After the 2008 recession I lost my job when the insurance company I was working for was sold off, so I did try something completely different for a year: I was a certified energy advisor doing assessments to enable home owners to get government grants for energy efficiency upgrades. Very cool, but I missed the computer work and so went back to software fairly quickly. That's when I bought a MacBook and started building apps.

     

    It's fun to see how others got into their line of work!

     

    Cheers,

    -Nico

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