| Episodes | 47 |
| Mentions | 58 |
| Cited here | 33 |
| First — last | #14 — #714 |
| Top guests | Martin Lorton, Mehdi Sadaghdar, Alan Wolke |
| Related | electronics education |
Career transition in electronics covers movement between technical specialities, between employment and independent work, and into or out of engineering from adjacent fields. Engineers who dislike their current area of electronics commonly ask whether further study will open a route out; the practical answer is that additional study is not the mechanism, and that the move is made by changing jobs directly.[14] Where the destination is genuinely unrelated, the barrier is logistical rather than intellectual, because a newcomer cannot bill at a serious level in the new field and the transition must therefore be funded from somewhere other than the new work.[336] Career planning by job title tends to be abandoned with experience: after roughly ten years and several job changes the target shifts from a named position to a broader description of the work, and repeated changes reduce the reluctance to make drastic ones later.[670]
Economic conditions as a driver
Labour-market cycles have repeatedly redirected electronics careers. The early-1990s recession pushed electronics students into computing and information technology, a redirection common enough at the time that leaving an electronics course part-way through for an IT career was unremarkable; that IT career then ran twenty years.[206] Electrical engineering graduates of around 2000 entered a market that had just collapsed and many moved into IT instead, a path common enough to recur repeatedly among students later returning to electronics training.[625]
The same cycle produced a cautionary pattern in the opposite direction. During the dot-com and IT boom, vendor networking certifications such as Microsoft’s and Cisco’s were worth on the order of a 200,000 dollar salary, which drew people into the field on the strength of the credential alone.[136] When the IT market collapsed, those who had switched careers on the strength of a certification found the credential no longer commanded a premium, with some unable to obtain work at a fifth of the salary the boom had promised; a career change timed to a hiring boom carries the risk that the boom, not the skill, was the thing being paid for.[136]
Employment geography also matters. Hardware employment is concentrated, and the Seattle area in particular held a substantial number of hardware openings and employers, which is a consideration for anyone timing a return to electronics work.[421] Professional orchestral employment is scarce for structural reasons — a post only opens when an incumbent leaves and is then filled by audition — which is a standing reason musicians move into technical work.[403] Electrical installation, by contrast, is a licensed trade with protected entry, so a mid-career change into it requires serving a full apprenticeship regardless of the entrant’s age or prior career.[683]
Transitions forced or prompted by an employer
Some moves originate with the employer. Being transferred onto a product line that a newer product from the same company has already displaced is a signal that a role is ending: Philip Frieden worked on AMD’s 29000 family and was then made the last product planning manager for the 2900 bit-slice line that the 29000 had superseded.[103] The sale of an employer to a competitor functions as a decision point rather than an automatic transfer, and having a standing offer elsewhere at that moment is what makes the exit available; in Bart Dring’s case the standing offer led to joining Inventables.[438] Corporate restructuring can also relocate an engineer internationally instead of ending the job: in Altium’s reorganisation around 2011 staff were either moved to Shanghai or laid off, while Ben Jordan was instead moved back to the United States.[593]
Redundancy can convert a side activity into a primary occupation. The move to full-time independent electronics content was not a planned career change but the consequence of being laid off by Altium, which converted a part-time blog into a full-time occupation.[306] A request to reduce to part-time hours is likewise a negotiation an employer can simply refuse; where the employer has no part-time arrangement to offer, the request can end in a full departure rather than a reduced one.[341] Employer mandates returning staff to the office became a reason to change jobs for those who valued remote work, and the value placed on remote work divides by household circumstances, with one engineer ready to return after six months at home while people with children weighed it very differently; a related trade is accepting a less enjoyable job for higher pay when the enjoyable one does not cover the bills.[564]
In the wind-down of a startup, the terms an engineer can obtain depend on holding something of value; without leverage the outcome is dictated to them, and securing an asset of value shifts the balance of the negotiation.[394] An engineer with a public specialism in a field large companies are entering may not have to search for work at all after a startup fails: where Jeri Ellsworth’s specialism was augmented reality, senior positions were offered by the major companies unprompted.[394]
Transitions chosen by the engineer
A common trigger for leaving a large semiconductor employer to found a company is reaching the limit of what can be achieved inside it rather than dissatisfaction with the employer; Brett Fox left Maxim, about which he stated he had nothing but good things to say, once the choice narrowed to continuing in the same role or attempting something different.[129] A related reason is the expectation of stopping learning: Robert Feranec left a settled engineering job on the judgment that staying longer would mean not growing, a decision that coincided with family reasons for returning to Slovakia, and the departure was made without a new engineering job lined up, the initial plan being to write websites instead.[316]
A first job that turns out to be field technician work rather than the design work trained for is a reason to move rather than to wait for internal promotion; an unwillingness to wait two years for the intended work led to a move found through an industry job board in the 2011 to 2012 period.[670] Where a target speciality has few openings and heavy competition, one route in is to create the position rather than apply for it: unable to find an audio electronics job from a role in oil and gas, Stephen Craig left and ran his own audio electronics business for several years instead.[670]
Founding a company can require leaving a job that is not itself the problem. Natasha Baker quit a job she liked, with limited savings, on the reasoning that the attempt would otherwise never be made.[531] An engineer founding a software product can usually acquire the missing skills, so the binding constraint is not capability but runway: whether there is enough saved time and money to spend learning them before the product must earn.[531]
Where a business is founded can also be chosen deliberately rather than inherited: after eleven months of travel spent evaluating locations, Fabienne Serrière selected Seattle as a base, on the judgment that starting a business in the United States is easier and more advisable than doing so elsewhere.[257]
Staging and funding a transition
Leaving a stable salary to work independently rests on preconditions assembled beforehand: a support network and accumulated savings from a well-paid job made one such departure survivable.[549] Someone with dependants moving into an unproven income source treats risk reduction as the governing constraint; in Mehdi Sadaghdar’s case it took about four years of running a channel alongside a job before the shift was judged feasible at all.[562] That transition was then indexed to income thresholds: when Patreon plus channel revenue reached half the salary, the salaried role was cut to part-time, and about six months later, once the revenue matched the whole salary, the job was left entirely.[562]
Reducing fixed living costs is another way to make a modest independent income sufficient. Moving from Boston to Pittsburgh brought Stephen Hawes’s mortgage to a little over 500 dollars a month, at which point existing Patreon support was enough to leave a staff job at Formlabs and work on the project full-time.[686] An offer of venture funding is not automatically the right next step for a newly independent hardware project: an approach from a patron offering venture capital was declined because taking it was understood to mean closing the source, against the intent of keeping the design a common good.[686]
Building income in the destination field part-time alongside the first career is a further route: part-time writing for Hackaday and private teaching supplemented Mike Szczys’s income as a musician, and the option to go full-time arrived when Supply Frame bought the site in 2013.[403] An international relocation driven by a partner’s employment need not end the other partner’s career either; Martin Lorton continued an existing job by telecommuting across the move, preserving employment through a two-year posting abroad and through the period in which EDS was bought by HP.[206]
Two product businesses in unrelated markets cannot be run at once by one person. Fran Blanche planned the transition between them as a staged wind-down of one over roughly a year while the other was returned to production and its line expanded.[263] Winding down need not be a single retirement event either: at 60 Jack Ganssle expected never to retire, by about 65 fatigue prompted a cut to fewer hours per week and to roughly one seminar trip per month, and at just short of 67 retirement was still not intended.[489]
Building credibility and skills for a move
Publishing tutorials publicly while learning a subject builds visible credibility for someone whose formal study lies elsewhere, because the record shows the learning process itself and is useful to other people; it is one route by which a person studying an unrelated field establishes standing in electronics.[14] A public open-source project can also generate the contact that later becomes a job: a company searching for the leading open-source laser cutter found its author working a few miles away, and the relationship that began with sample kits and gift certificates preceded the eventual offer of employment.[438]
Entering paid embedded work without an engineering degree is possible where a sustained compulsion to build supplies the skill; the distinguishing feature is that the work is what the person would be doing anyway rather than a hobby switched off when the paid day ends.[194]
Structured self-study supports both re-entry and lateral moves. The Art of Electronics works poorly as a first textbook but well as a refresher for an engineer returning to design work after time away, and a concentrated read of a couple of weeks was enough preparation to be hired back into design after a period out of it.[127] For a consultant, unpaid skill-building during a slack period can convert directly into billable work: self-directed study of robotics and machine learning, covering the Robot Operating System, image processing and deep neural networks, was followed by a contract that used all of it.[422] One model for a long technical career is a sequence of self-directed programmes of roughly four to five years each in a new domain, run using the method for learning a field acquired during a doctorate; successive cycles covered chip design, optics, and manufacturing and electronics.[336]
A skill set abandoned at the start of a technical career can also become the basis of a later one: two years of college aimed at theatre lighting design gave way to online software work during the dot-com boom, and the performance and storytelling side lay unused for about ten years until video distribution existed to make use of it.[414]
Consequences of a completed transition
The largest adjustment in turning long-running unpaid project work into a livelihood is that each activity must afterwards be justified by the income it produces rather than chosen for interest alone.[349] Converting a skill practised as a side project into a job description likewise removes the option of abandoning the parts that are hard or unenjoyable, and adds schedule pressure that the same work did not carry when it was voluntary.[622]
Advancement can move an engineer away from the work that started the career. Ray Ozzie, a developer by background, stopped coding in 1996 as the company he led grew, the work shifting to managing people.[603]
Moving back toward design from an adjacent non-design role such as operations management presents a different difficulty: the binding constraint is obtaining the first opportunity rather than the technical knowledge, since remaining at an engineering company keeps the person partly in touch with the work.[674] Developer-relations work at a small company can serve as a workable destination for someone moving from content work into firmware, because its day-to-day shape resembles consulting — internal and external customers, frequent context switching, and integration of existing platforms and libraries rather than building base-level technology such as network drivers.[622]