Junior Engineer - Looking for Advice and Words of Perspective/Wisdom

[msmith]

Hello,

I love the channel and Dave's content. This is my first time posting and figured the community around Dave might be a great place to seek some perspective.

I'm a EE working in the electronics field for about 3 years now and I feel like I truly am learning and building under some giants that have paved the path before me. I always like to keep a side project going as well to maybe get involved in some areas I wouldn't otherwise get exposure to. However, the words of Dave and some others frequently ring in my brain that tell me I need to be doing more and having more direction in my pursuits. I work at one of those RnD shops that basically owns your brain in the contract, but it's a great place to have guidance from the best engineers in my area (not too many opportunities and I'd like to stay in the area for life reasons). I have this odd sense of urgency that grows and grows each day to create something that is mine, but the voice seems to occasionally be counterproductive in demanding motion and not direction. This may be more of a life question than a career question and I'm not exactly sure if I'm even making sense to myself haha, but I'm sure people have had similar feelings and want to know what has helped/hurt people when trying to understand where to dedicate effort to (especially in the earlier stages of their career).

Hope everyone is safe and happy during these odd times!

-MS

[daqq]

I'd say that anything you create and you want to create will be a good for you, both for your professional life, but just as importantly (perhaps more) for you personal life.

As to where you should dedicate your efforts, well, yourself. It's important to enjoy your hobby, even if you want to spend your free time creating something fairly useless, whether it's a transistor clock of your own design, your own CPU architecture or a steampunk multimeter.

And do not be deceived - even such (or especially such?) frivolous applications will teach you more than you'd expect. And if you give me three engineers to choose from, all with equal resumes but one shows me his transistor clock then it's a clear choice for me which one to hire.

However, if you want to go in a specific direction, I'd say go with things that have broad applications. Focusing on the latest web 5.0 framework that's in vogue this year is all well and good, but learning to work with FPGAs is better and looks better on your resume. Try building something you want to build and applying a technology you've never worked with but seems fun into it. A line follower robot with five cameras, powered by an FPGA or something like NVidia Jetson is delightfully useless and total overkill, but will teach you sooo much.

And don't forget to enjoy things outside of electronics.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Identify your strengths and play to them.

It took me a long time to do that but once I did, it gave me the direction I needed. But don't take as long as I did - 24 years I worked for just one company and never had a real plan so just wandered aimlessly along doing what needed to be done. Some of it was satisfying. Some was mortifying. Some was soul-destroying. I didn't get the creative outlet at work, so I did a lot of stuff in my own time. When I finally decided to leave the company, I took stock of my time with them to identify the things I enjoyed, the things that just seemed to work, the things that I thought I was good at but actually was anything but. A pattern soon emerged and I used that to identify what to do - and what not to do - in setting up my own business. Of course, the shitty times in my career proved to be important lessons.

If I had known at the start of my career what I know now, I would have paid more attention to identifying my strengths and weakness and leveraging that knowledge.

[bob91343]

I agree.  If you don't enjoy your job, find something else.  I labored for years in industry and finally got up the courage to start my own business.  One of the best decisions of my life.

The details are not important.  What is important is the fulfillment of desires I didn't know I had.  I had a lot of fun, although there are things that one must do to survive.  The two main things are to do what you enjoy and to be good at it.  And of course to supply a service or product that can succeed in the marketplace.

One thing I did that was necessary for me was to have a partner.  It didn't matter if the partner was competent, just that I had one to stabilize my efforts.  In my case it was a girl friend and luckily she was bright and brave and we got along great.

The business lasted 13 years until I burned out and wanted something different.

[Terry Bites]

I made the same mistakes as a lot of engineers have. Hanging onto jobs you hope will get better. Is thier an engineer martyr syndrome? Dont feel bad about giving up engineering if it makes you unhappy. Be loyal to yourself.