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Wayward EE lost and lamenting

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Electro Fan:

--- Quote from: NSCI0T7 on October 04, 2020, 03:18:43 am ---No passion anymore.  Can someone light a fire for me? I see everyone posting projects of electronics they did, but I'm not into hobby circuits.  I need something serious with hard physics to get me going.

What future could possibly result for someone like me.

--- End quote ---

The good news is that the future could be almost anything.

The bad news is the lack of passion is a problem.  Without that everything is going to feel like work without much purpose.

My suggestion would be to temporarily quit thinking about the next job you want and take some time to figure out what career and life you want.  If you could imagine something that would be great at the end of your career, something that you would really enjoy doing when your career was fully mature - what would that be?

Start with the goal in mind, rather than the next step, then work backward from the goal.  What would you be going just before you retired?  What would you be doing 5 years before that?  10 years before that? And so on until you know what the next step should be in the coming year.  Break the goal down to steps on the way to the goal.

Having said that, this will take some inspection.  What are the attributes of the goal in terms of intellectual interests, monetary needs/wants, and so on.  This might get you halfway to defining the goal, but it probably won't get you all the way there.  Why?  Because these sorts of questions are all about you.  In order to prosper (monetarily, emotionally, etc etc) at almost anything, you have to add value to something beside you.  So, you need to ask, in what field or in what endeavor could you do something that would make the world better for someone else?  Someone else might be a company in an industry, or better yet the customers of that company, or someone somewhere that would benefit from whatever you and your company and your industry does.

Surely, there must be some areas where you say.... "that's cool, that's good, that's desirable, the world will benefit from that, that will make lots of things go better."  Then in those areas that you define as good and appealing, ask yourself "what role can I play, what role do I want to play in that company, industry, field, endeavor?" etc.

The point is that looking for a next job is like driving by observing the hood ornament on a car.  You don't want a job - especially one that is going nowhere in particular, you want a career and a life.  If you spend enough time and commit to figuring out the goal then whatever you have to do next or should do next to put you in a direction toward the goal, that will be a lot more clear and motivational.

Once you get this squared away the work might not be easy but it should be self-motivational, and it will take on a momentum of it's own.  However, until you get it dialed in there might be some "work" involved.  If this process was easy, everyone would be doing it.  But it takes some thought and commitment, and sometimes it takes sacrificing something in the short term for the long term.  Be careful about the "I can't move."  If you are really in a location where the options are so narrow that you can't see how you can ever get to "there" from "here", you might have to change "here."  People have moved to new apartments, homes, cities, and countries.  If you have to, you have to, and you can - but you are more likely to understand why if you think more in terms of not what you are leaving, but where you are going.

In the end, this might be something that very directly uses your EE academic background or it might be something tangential, but it will likely harness at least parts of what you have already assembled - in a way that helps you to your goal (which is not your next job).

Yogi Berra said unless you know where you are going you could wind up somewhere else. :)

asmi:

--- Quote from: coppice on October 05, 2020, 01:18:49 pm ---Every organisation I've ever worked in, or observed from the outside, paid and respected mediocre software people better than the very best hardware people. It has just become a strange norm that software people get paid better. There is never a shortage of capable hardware people. There is only a shortage of people prepared to work for the pay that is on offer. Shortages self correct when the money is right, but the culture in many countries is to not pay what it takes to get the best people.

--- End quote ---
This is why I tend to take on projects with a "full stack development" - all the way from the HW into complete SW. And I charge SW rates for everything :-DD It actually makes the whole process more efficient, because many SW design aspects have implications in HW design, which normally needs to be communicated to HW guys (and vice versa too). And whenever there is a communication, there is always a chance for the loss of data - ranging from innocent misunderstandings all the way to active sabotage. If SW designer and HW designer is the same person, this problem disappears.

NSCI0T7:
Someone once told me all the good analog engineers are 50+, and they're going to be retiring soon.  I don't know how true that is.

ebastler:

--- Quote from: NSCI0T7 on October 05, 2020, 05:29:30 pm ---Someone once told me all the good analog engineers are 50+, and they're going to be retiring soon.  I don't know how true that is.

--- End quote ---

Yes, that thought crossed my mind when rstofer presented his data on "1000 new EE jobs per year" due to the (limited) expansion of the industry. Retirement is probably missing from that equation, so the employment perspectives are presumably quite a bit better than the number suggests.

"Plain old analog" design (as in audio or such) is probably a shrinking domain. But it's also bound to attract very few new EE graduates. So if you can e.g. complement that with RF skills, and if it "floats your boat", I would say give it a try.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: NSCI0T7 on October 05, 2020, 05:29:30 pm ---Someone once told me all the good analog engineers are 50+, and they're going to be retiring soon.  I don't know how true that is.

--- End quote ---
It isn't. Most analog engineers I have encountered have been parked in meaningless jobs because there is no more work for them. Given the chance they do come up with brilliant circuits but those are not in high demand.

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