Looking Back on My Engineering Career, Part 3: Beyond Hardware Engineering
A brief professional biography (but long for Medium)
I’m on the verge of retirement (less than two years) so it’s a good time for me to look back on my career. In Part 1, I covered my time working at two large corporations, Intel and Tandem Computers. In Part 2, I wrote about all the start-up companies I bounced through. In this final Part 3, I will show you how I finally got to do something a bit different in my career.
As we left it in Part 2, I was burned out on hardware engineering and I was trying to find a place in the high tech industry doing something different. But I didn’t seem to be qualified for anything else. What to do?
I decided to seriously pursue the technical writing path. I enrolled in the excellent tech writing program at De Anza Community College. I found it rather amusing that, with an engineering degree from Berkeley and an MBA from the University of Santa Clara, I needed to go to community college in order to get a job. But I’m glad I did it because I learned a lot.
The booklet Asic Basics that was the cover picture for Part 1 of this series was a project for one of my tech writing classes. Developing Printed Circuit Assemblies: From Specifications to Mass Production was another.
With my tech writing certificate under my belt, I went job hunting. I got two offers. One was from a company in the valley that made primarily read-only memory chips. The other was from a tiny marketing consulting company in Foster City, 30 miles north up Highway 101. They mostly prepared marketing materials for HP mainframe computers. The chip company was well within my technical expertise, the offer was higher in salary, and the commute was much shorter. But the work promised to be boring as hell, writing endless manuals for similar memory chips. I decided to stretch and take the job in Foster City.
I was glad I did. Despite the miserable commute, the little company was lots of fun and I learned a great deal from the wise, generous woman, Peggy Clymer, who owned and ran the business. However, after a couple of years, HP pulled the contract and she decided, regretfully, to close the business. HP came crawling back to Peggy shortly after because the new vendor was not nearly as good, but the company was gone by then.
I found a spot as the sole marketing writer in a small company that made computer network taps and monitoring switches. It was fun but I soon became bored, writing variations on essentially the same marketing messages over and over. So I moved over to Product Management, basically supporting the company’s one product manager, who was also a company co-founder. I was good at the stuff he wasn’t so great at, so it was a good fit.
The company was just beginning development of their first monitoring switch. The software team was doing the embedded switch software, which driven by a Command Line Interface (CLI), i.e., typing at a terminal. Over in Product Management, we thought the product needed a web-browser-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) to make it easier to use and more friendly. But the software engineering manager said he didn’t have the resources to develop a GUI. Having had some experience creating several iterations of my own personal website (www.lannierose.com), I decided to give it a go in my spare time.
My GUI got pretty good and the company decided they wanted it officially. I transferred to engineering and worked on it full time, also developing GUIs for their active tap and bypass switch products. Hey, at last I was a software engineer!
A couple of years later that company got acquired and then a bigger fish acquired that company. After one year, they shut down our division. I was laid off again.
Now 60 years old (but I could pass for 50), I was hardly a hot commodity in the job market. I finally got a job offer as a lead software engineer at a small company that … well I forget what they did exactly. Because, when they asked for references, one of my old managers asked me to come and work for him! He had returned to his home country of Israel and started a company that basically copied the more profitable network taps and monitoring switches from that other company where I had written GUIs. He needed a GUI for his products and it was obviously in my wheelhouse.
And that’s where I’ve been ever since. (CGS Tower Networks, if you care.) It’s my dream job. I get to work from home sitting on my couch with a pillow supporting my bad back. I never go to meetings. I communicate mostly by email and MS Teams chat, and sometimes phone calls. And, of course, the code version control system and the issue tracking system. I don’t travel at all, which is what I want at my age and in today’s world. I plan to ride it out for a couple of more years (assuming that the company lasts that long) and retire at age 70 on maximum Social Security and my pretty healthy savings/investments.
About a half year in, the company decided they need a central management server. Would I take on that project? I told them, “You do not want to do this. It is so complex, it will never get done.” I told them, “You do not want me to do this. I have no experience on servers or writing this type of management system.” They said, “Just give it a try. Just get us a demo so we have something to show our customers.”
Well, if they wanted to pay me to learn new skills on their dime, I was up for giving it a try.
You know how the “just a demo” thing goes. It took a couple of years to get to a minimum viable product, but it is a product, not just a demo. I spend about half time on that and the other half on the web GUI for individual products.
My tech stack, which was all entirely new to me: I wanted to work all in JavaScript, as my C coding skills suck. So I use nodejs as a foundation, running in an Ubuntu virtual machine (VM). I found a server kit named Feathers.js that forms the client-server base. I got MongoDB for a central data store and Elasticsearch for a monitoring statistics database. Of course nginx for a reverse proxy. Everything runs in Docker containers. I use Vue.js for the client and Vuetify for the component library. (Not component components, but widgets.) I rely heavily on Chrome browser development tools. I’m a real software engineer, with all the cool tools!
So what is my assessment of my career? I’ve done a lot of interesting, creative work. I’ve touched a lot of different products. I’ve been a productive member of a lot of teams. I’ve always made a quite comfortable salary, even with the high cost-of-living in Silicon Valley. I didn’t make a fortune on any of my many start-ups, but only the lucky few ever do.
Have I made the world a better place? Probably not. Everywhere I’ve worked, some other company was making essentially the same product. Nothing I’ve worked on has helped the environment or helped solve poverty or income inequality. Maybe I helped diminish racism the tiniest little bit, as I’ve enjoyed working with many people of different races and cultures.
On the other hand, I feel like I have brought a bit of kindness, compassion, generosity, and humor everywhere I’ve been throughout my career. Everyone has enjoyed working with me and came to depend on my reliability and honesty. So I believe I’ve made the lives of a lot of people a little bit brighter, and that thought makes me happy. I guess that is my true legacy.
My professional career is just about over, but my life is not. I plan to continue to spread kindness, compassion, generosity, and humor going forward in the next phase of my life. See ya there!
— Lannie Rose, June 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing.
