| General > General Technical Chat |
| How to be a contractor |
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| Kasper:
--- Quote from: jonpaul on November 05, 2022, 07:39:25 am ---OP: As a contractor or consultant you will have NO time for TV, Video, Family, etc. You will be on call 24/7 if you want to suceed. Like a small biz startup. Kindly suggest that you STOP ANY VIDEOS! STOP ANY GAMES OR SOCIAL MEDIA! READ TEXTBOOKS! Just the rambling of an old retired EE (since 55 years) Jon --- End quote --- Between school, home renos and work, I had little 'unproductive' time for about 10 years. I'm looking for a little more balance now. |
| Kasper:
--- Quote from: AndyC_772 on November 05, 2022, 01:43:38 pm --- What leaps out at me, is that you're academically qualified and have 14 years' experience, yet you describe your own skill level as 'junior' in terms of anything complex, and the tools you're still using are hobby grade at best. Why is that? What have you been doing for those 14 years? Designing, or just soldering? Being a consulting engineer (and maybe that's not what you mean by 'contractor'...?) means you need to be able to confidently walk in to a new customer's office, listen to their needs, and using your own skill and experience, decipher what they really mean, and convince them that you can offer a solution. Or walk away if you know you can't. --- End quote --- I think this is one of my specialties: figuring out my 'customers' ' problems and offering them well defined solutions. Most of my 'customers' have been my employer/CEO/manager who does not have electronics experience. They usually have big dreams and small budgets and I provide good enough solutions to receive great performance reviews. My first 4 years was in a medium sized company with lots of skilled people. Did 2 years in production: soldering mods, testing, troubleshooting then 2 years in test documentation and automation. Since then I've been mostly doing design work, with a bit of soldering in start ups where there's a FW guy, a SW guy and I do HW, mech, purchasing and prototype production and testing. It's usually just a few sensors, a battery and an MCU. It does have to be small and have good battery life but it's relatively basic. I have made somewhat complex test automation, made diy emc probes and used them with my oscilloscope to find and mute noise, I've written algorithms for calibration and compensation and I've made a test board with a 0.4mm pitch bga for $100. When things don't work or harder stuff comes up I figure it out quickly and make good quality products. I just haven't worked on any really complex systems and I come here and see there is a lot of stuff I've never touched. |
| AndyC_772:
OK, good answer. I wish you the best of luck! |
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