Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Good advice.

Being flexible
Larry J — (archived)

I'm 46 years old. Since I graduated high school, I've done the following:

1. US Army, Airborne Infantry
2. Electronics technician training
3. US Air Force, language student (Hebrew, bad mistake!)
4. US Air Force, communications
5. Full time college student (Math, physics minor)
6. School teacher
7. US Air Force, satellite and space operations
8. Full time student (following a 25% drawdown in the military in 1992, forcing me to start all over on a career at age 35). Completed a Masters in Software Engineering in 9 months, including pre-reqs.
9. Entry level programmer, MCI
10. STA, database development for Milstar & UFO satellites
11. STA, multimedia development
12. STA, contract programming for DEC/Compaq
13. STA, internal R&D programming, crypto system
14. SI (bought STA, killed the crypto project) - developing operational architecture for military and government space systems.

The point to listing all of these things is that none of them were planned. I graduated high school in 1975, the year the first personal computers were invented. I never even saw a computer until years later. Now, I work on them full time for a living.

I just took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves along the way. Especially in high tech, that means constantly having to learn new tools, techniques, and languages (I'd never heard of operational architectures 2 years ago, now I do it full time).

The tech industry is just beginning to recover, for reasons I explained in this post over on the CE board. Never give up, never surrender. I think things will pick up quite a bit this year. If you're already on the inside, you stand to do well.

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