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Adventuresome or "Hands On" Careers in Tech?
omission9 asks: "For about 10 years I have worked mostly behind a desk in a cubicle and am starting to feel that this environment is making me miserable. The cheap fluorescent lights, the stuffy air, and the restless feeling I get from just sitting so long are starting to really annoy me. My background is mainly as a programmer but I started my career as a network engineer/network
administrator. I am also a member of the US Naval Reserve and am cleared as high as Top Secret. Are there any jobs out there that match this sort of skill set (more or less programmer but generally excellent tech skills) that don't require being stuck behind a desk? Paying relatively well would be a major plus
as would something that provides a solid career (20+ years of work). Is there anyone out there, from anywhere other than a cube farm,
that may have some advice?"
Raytheon Polar Services is the contractor providing services on all US antarctic installations.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Go start your own business. If you succeed you can kiss the cube farm by forever. If you fail you'll feel grateful only having to work 50 hours a week, even if it is under fluorescent lighting.
I spent years trying to get out of 'adventuresome' jobs so I could sleep in my own job every night.
There are lots of companies who install their equipment all over the world. I am sure some of them would be glad to meet you. The people who install and maintain the equipment aren't abnormally skilled and getting those jobs is mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time. As always; network.
Teach people how to program... it will get you up out of a desk, in front of people, and into a challenging environment where helping people learn is the probably one of the most rewarding experiences you can take.
If you need to get into this, check out a continuing education program at a local technical college.
1. IT for companies that are doing stuff out in the field, such as field science, oil prospecting/drilling, etc.
2. Lateral move into sciences, doing fieldwork. Fieldwork engineer/scientists who can also do IT fluently, particularly programming, are often golden in some fields where the combination is hard to find.
3. Aerospace - new rocket companies (XCOR, SpaceX, etc). John Carmack isn't hiring right now I think, but that might change.
4. Systems engineering, with your background you might do aerospace or naval systems engineering.
Question: are you tied down by family, or relatively mobile?
Another option is a small, maybe 1-person shop. I do everything for a small manufacturing plant and it's fun work. I can code, design apps, admin dbs and systems, program PLCs or do computer-monkey work depending on my mood. Plus, I get to see all of my handiwork in action in a factory. I'll never go back to a cube farm again.
Of course, you'll either have to invent your position or wait for someone to die to get a job like this.
Man, you really need that seminar!
All jokes aside, I spent a few months last year working for a civilian contractor just south of Baghdad. I was on the operations side of the house, but I gained a tremendous respects for the IT and logistics folks. In addition to a very good wage, you'll get to work with people can you can relate to from your Navy days, you'll be doing important work (i.e. people really need you for their food, fuel, work, and family contact.) Where I was, literally all telephones and interweb data came through the satellite dish, and let me tell you, it was tough when it went down down for a week. I also found the work to be terribly satisfying compared to my time in a cube farm; everyone around you is working toward a common goal, with less of the corporate buzzspeak, busywork, and tedium of the office.
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
Since you sound like a US citizen, I suggest CIA or State Department. You get to travel the world and do interesting stuff. All the fun that goes with being in the military on deployment with few of the drawbacks. Plus you can retire early after 5 years of overseas work (I think, but I may be dating myself here). Highly recommended if you don't mind travel.
I would not recommend NSA however, its mostly more of what you are complaining about. CIA goes where NSA fears to tread (or is prevented by policy...). State Dept is in every embassy and consulate, which means you could go anywhere. Both are great careers, in my opinion.
There's a ton of science and social science that's done in the field: ecology; archaeology, primatology; ethnology; ethnobotany; geology; palentology; oceanography.
In some field seasons nothing much interesting happens; in most something interesting enough to write about happens. And in a very few seasons, careers and reputations can be made. It is in those rare, once in a lifetime seasons that careers and reputations are made. In those seasons, there is never enough time to do everything that is needed. The ability to store and analyze data in real time can make a great difference.
I have (from the comfort of my desk) worked with a number of field scientists over the years. By in large they are either technologically hopeless, or enthusiastic but unskilled. They usually rely on graduate students, usually a graduate student, to take care of their tech. A few lucky ones have a grad student who has a year or two experience in IT. Even though they only have a few rudimentary skills, they are regarded as if they have some rare gift. And it is rare, to have more than basic IT skills.
You could go to grad school, or try to find or create a staff job. If you've been in business, act like an entrepreneur. Find somebody doing something you are interested in, and create an opportunity. Principal Investigators are like entrepreneurs too. They have to sing for their supper, convince the funders that their project is more worthy than other projects.
Now the downside: science is done for love and glory, not money. Scientists who have achieved tenure live a secure, middle class lifestyle, but everyone else is hand to mouth. You might not get paid at all, or paid a pittance. If you're lucky, you might make 20-30K. You might have to work for nothing until you can bring in some grant money. On the other hand, set this against the things you might be doing: travelling to Africa to study lions; trekking the silk road to find uncharted ruins; exploring the jungle of New Guinea to find the last speaker of a dying language.
Some research even involves danger. I happened to be at CDC Ft Collins DVBID when they were scrambling a team of epidemiologists and trop-med guys to go to Africa because of an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever. Most people would be running the other way, but when some new disease like Ebola emerges and has people bleeding out their eyeballs, somebody has to get on the ground to study it. Presumably those people could use somebody to look after their sat phones, fix their laptops, figure out how to make their databases work.
How much would experiences like that be worth in dollar terms?
In the few times I've gone into the field, I've had some thrilling experiences: unearthing what was the forth known instance of a fossil shark species; assisting a paleontolgist with a triceratops skull. Even the mundane things you do are out of the ordinary, like hiking the trails of the badlands in the early morning fragance of crushed sagebrush rising from your boots, or clambering up a remote talus slope in search of the next find.
Life is, in the end, about filling your limited allotment of time with wonderful experiences. Money is only instrumental to that end. If you have no dependents who are relying on your income, why not spend a few years doing things that many people dream about, but only one in a thousand experience?
Suppose, after a few years, you decide to go back to corporate IT. Imagine that the first item on your resume was that you spent the last two years exploring and raising artifacts from a 2000 year old Roman warship. Or maybe you were part of a team that discovered a dozen new plant species unknown to science, one of which shows promise in treating cancer. Is that going to lose you any interviews, versus having have worked with the Java framework du jour? Maybe, but not at any place you or I would want to work at.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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I agree with semiconductor R&D, as being very rewarding.
I started as a "validation tech", pushing parts through the handlers. This was destructive and non-destructive testing on big lots of parts. We get the parts straight out of the fab, test and keep only the good ones. Then we split this huge lot into several lots, and each sub-lot goes to a different "stress", maybe ESD, steam chamber (can we force moisture into the package), etc. Later we test the part to see how many we killed. It was a good place to start, and I dazzled some Engineers.
I was asked to move into a Product Engineering Group. In product engineering there are lots of different jobs. Right now, I do "Design Validation". Remember that transistors are 3-dimensional structures made with a photo-graphic process. So with just a little variation in the fab (Yes Virginia, this does happen), the transistors behave differently. My job is to measure different power, timing on different fab lots. This involves very high speed test equipment, and lots of PERL scripting. I run on three different types of testers. I setup the testing process and make it fully automated (PERL in UNIX). Running the actual job gets passed to a validation group (see the second paragraph), and I move on to incorporating a new test type (semiconductor R&D is never static). I still own the old jobs, and as long as they run fully automated, I just reduce the data, and publish a data report.
Semiconductor R&D has a large variety of tasks, in and out of different labs, lots of different testers, some programming, some data analysis, some teaching (test methods), some hardware work too.
If a semiconductor companies R&D ever becomes static, it's time to go short on that stock.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
More specifically to the skillset and security rating of original article poster: BAN chip programming research. Once we're done losing to inferior technology enemies due to bad tactics, we will eventually have to face high technology armies on the battlefield. For that we're going to need ROM based, hardened, wireless networking among our troops. Bonus if you can also pinpoint the battlefield encrypted tranmissions of the opposing army on the heads up displays of our troops. That's where the excitement you're looking for lies. Battlefield Area Networking. Encrypted Packet IPV6 on top of a 802.16 Mesh Network I would suspect, but getting it all working will be a challenge when you consider you're going to have to make it scaleable from 4 nodes to more than a million nodes and deployable in a war zone. The human equivalent of the Borg- and it can't be Microsoft.
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