It’s been 10 years now since I graduated from college. Scary. Where does the time go?
I don’t talk about what I do much on my blog, but here is a summary of what I have done for the last decade, work wise:
Worked at a company called Dalec Electronics. Real small place. I was a big fish in a very small sea. I started as a technician, then as a lab manager, then as sales person. I really really hate sales. I will never do it again. I learned a lot about test and measurement there. Load cells, pressure transducers, panel meters, thermocouples, RTD’s, and many other measurement devices. Turns out I would follow the path of test and measurement for most of my career to date.
Then, I worked at a place called Instrument Repair service for a little more than a year. They are out of business now. Word of advice, never base 95% of your business on one client. I repaired telephone linesmen equipment. Stuff like butt sets (telephones you can ‘butt’ into a line with), break down boxes, cable locators, and other mundane devices. I did learn two things: How to fix something without schematics, and why land line phone calls sound so bad. They sound bad because some of the junctions formed by creating a carbon bridge.
After that, I worked at MPC Products as an Environmental Test Engineer. That basically means I got to torture test aerospace equipment. I learned how to perform temperature, vibration, shock, salt fog, icing, vacuum, and many other tests. I tested the cooling pump for the F-22, I tested the engine cowl opener for the A380 and much more in my time there. Good people, crappy pay, too much stress and deadlines.
Now I work at Grayhill. This has been my most challenging job so far. I design automated testers for all sorts of rotary switches and joysticks. My first big project is something I named F.A.T.E. Fully Automated Tester for Encoders. In this case, optical encoders. It measures torque, pushbutton force and travel, duty cycle, phase angles, and many other parameters that separate a quality switch from crap. I have learned a lot of LabView and data acquisition and motion control. Pretty cool stuff if you are an electronics engineer, which is what I am.
Overall, I am pretty happy with the choice I made 13 years ago. To be honest, it was kind of spur of the moment. I really didn’t know what to do with my life. At the time, electronics was a very hot industry in the U.S. It somewhat is now, but so much is being shipped to China. I find it nice to work an American electronics manufacturer. I only really hated the end of one job and my year fixing dirty telephone equipment. One thing is for sure, it sure beats working retail or flipping burgers.