#670 – Engineering Careers with Circuit Break & James Lewis

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released June 14th, 2024. Episode 670. Engineering Careers with Circuit Break and James Lewis. Welcome to the Empire. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. And this is a bit of a piggyback episode where I was on the Circuit Break podcast by the great folks at Macrofab, along with James Lewis, who's a bald engineer online and also works doing some stuff for ML Element 14 and other content outfits. And we got together to talk about careers, career paths, where we've been, where we're going, that sort of thing. And it turned into a great conversation. So I decided to post that here because Macrofab is going to post it this coming week. Dave and I actually also recorded an episode this week, so I'm going to push that off a little bit. I don't think there's anything too timely through there, but I'll double check and make sure. And if it is, I'll push it a little bit earlier than normal. Otherwise, though, enjoy this conversation with Parker, Stephen, and James and about engineering careers.

Stephen Craig: We're going to do introductions for everyone, including ourselves. Stephen, do you want to go first? Sure. I am Stephen Craig.

Dave Jones: I am co-host of the Circuit Break podcast and a component engineer in the aerospace industry. My background includes oil and gas sensor design, contract manufacturing, audio electronic repair, and synthesizer design.

Stephen Craig: I am Parker Dolman, co-founder and lead electrical designer here at Macrofab, a company changing the PCB manufacturing process with transparent pricing and efficient production solutions. I have a background in embedded system design and digital signal processing, and I've been in the manufacturing industry for over 10 years now. And y'all fight on which one goes next.

Chris Gammell: James, you go. You go. You go ahead.

James Lewis: Yo, my name is James Lewis, and I'm a freelance content creator for Bald Engineer Media. You might know me from my YouTube channel, Ad Ohms, or as a video host on Element 14 Presents, or maybe from some of the product and project write-ups I do over on hackster.io news. Great. Your turn, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Thanks, James. Yo. Thanks, yo. I am the host of the Amp Hour podcast, 14 years running, and I'm developer relations lead at Goliath. We're an IoT SaaS startup that connects stuff to the internet, and I get to build hardware that has things like Bluetooth and cellular and Wi-Fi and Ethernet and everything else, and I use a lot of Zephyr real-time operating system, which I love and I love talking about. Thanks for having us, guys.

Dave Jones: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Stephen Craig: Yo. Yo. Sorry. Okay. We're going to have an episode. This is kind of going to be unusual because we're going to be talking about engineering career paths, which is something we and actually just engineers in general just don't really like to talk about. We have four engineers that also probably don't like to talk about that kind of stuff, but we're going to do it anyways.

Chris Gammell: Who is the target audience for this then, Parker? Is it like the youngins? Is it the young pups? Is that who we're trying to talk to? Or are they more like the advanced engineers that are looking to be retrospective about their careers?

Stephen Craig: You know, I should know what our target audience is with this podcast. It's whoever downloads this silly thing. Whoever downloads it.

Chris Gammell: Whoever's fastest on the donate button. Click now.

James Lewis: So I think if we, you know, I think it'd be easy to say for college, new college hires or people going to school or maybe people that are midway through their careers. But I think if we kind of step back, you can almost say at some point everybody has thought at least, where am I at in my career and am I going in a good direction? And, you know, while I don't like to ever say this can target everybody, I think there's a way that our audience could target everybody.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, probably not like someone who doesn't care about electronics. They're probably still in the electronics sphere. If they're like coming here for like generic career advice, they're probably going to be underwhelmed, you know.

James Lewis: But I don't think they'll be coming back if that's the case.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yes.

Dave Jones: But, okay, the four of us all kind of landed in engineering entertainment. Obviously, we're all here, right? Are you not entertained? Would you say that any of the four of us have had a generic career or a standard career? I would argue absolutely not.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if that exists. What is standard? Yeah, I don't know. Like, maybe give us your picture of the standard engineer.

Dave Jones: I guess it goes back to, you know, being younger and talking to my father about the workplace. And it was go to school, get your degree, get a job right out of school and do your damnedest to stay there for 30 something years. Save all your money that you can and then retire, right? And that's, I guess that's more of the air quotes generic.

Stephen Craig: Is that the NIST standard for an engineer then? I don't know. I've never, I have yet to be an engineer who-

Chris Gammell: Every day, get your NIST standard peanut butter sandwich, right?

Stephen Craig: Right, right, right. Yeah, actually, that's funny to think about because that's, even my dad didn't have what we call a standard because he wasn't a chemical engineer, but then he moved over to business. And so he kind of transitioned out of a standard engineering role.

Chris Gammell: Wait, do you all have parental figures that were engineers?

Stephen Craig: My dad was an engineer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: My father was a geophysicist.

James Lewis: Wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

James Lewis: Yeah, I, my, my parental figures were not, but there were members of my family that were engineers.

Chris Gammell: Wow, that's great. Sales. I come from the sales, sales family. My dad and my grandfather were salesmen and I knew what I didn't want to do was sales because my dad was traveling three to four days a week. For my entire childhood. Great dad. Don't, don't get me wrong. Wonderful. Wonderful dad. He just traveled a lot. So I knew I didn't want to do that.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. So that actually leans right into the first, first question we got here is how did we pick engineering to study? Why? Kind of like some background there.

James Lewis: I think the easy answer was you didn't have to spell very good. And so that worked out well for me.

Dave Jones: Fully honestly, you don't have to write as many papers. And that was a motivating factor. One of the motivating factors.

Chris Gammell: Really? Interesting. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I honestly, it was, I got into electronics in high school and it was one of those things where I enjoyed it enough where I was like, what can you do with this? And then realize that there's entire fields that are devoted to it. So it was like, I will do that.

James Lewis: Yeah, I actually have a really similar, I started in high school. I took a class, I think it was my sophomore year. The title of the class was communication technology. And what's interesting about it is covered all different types of ways that humanity communicates. We had a little bit of photography. We did some screen printing on T-shirts to talk about advertising. And then we had these little heat kits that we had set up LEDs to basically show that you could communicate by making lights flash. And then there was supposed to be an electronics component to that. But nobody else in the class cared at all about the electronics. But I did. And so that was, as soon as I started playing with that thing, I knew what I wanted to do.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, I was always building stuff as a kid, helping my dad fix cars and all that stuff. And my dad was an engineer. And I was like, you know what? If being an engineer lets me keep doing that kind of stuff, then that's what I was going to be. And I actually went to school originally to be a petroleum engineer. And then I started meeting people like Stephen's dad, a geophysicist, in sedimentary rock classes. And I was like, I'm not that excited for rocks. I can't do this. And at the time, I had just made my first printed circuit board as a side project. And I'm like, you know what? What about electrical engineering? And then I was the only person that transferred into the EE college that semester. I was too. So.

Chris Gammell: Have you guys known each other that long?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. We met in 2015 when I knocked on Macrofab's door. And I was like, I want a job. You can't even get boards made.

Chris Gammell: Parker said, you said, like Stephen's dad. I thought you meant you were actually learning from Stephen's dad. No, no, no, no, no.

Stephen Craig: Like Stephen's dad. That class was eye-opening. That's way better. It was eye-opening on like. That was the first time I was ever with other people that were so excited about something I didn't care about.

Dave Jones: Which, okay, by the way, my father still has rock collections that he brings out every once in a while just to look at. And every time he is visited up here in Colorado, I will come home from work or wherever and I will find random rocks on my front porch that he just went and found on a walk. And he's like, I'm just going to, I'm going to bring him home with me. Okay, dad, cool.

Chris Gammell: They followed me home, I swear. That's awesome.

Dave Jones: Do you let him keep them? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, his luggage on the way home is probably pretty heavy, huh?

Dave Jones: And he'll just be like, yeah, they were cool. I wanted them. Okay, dad.

Chris Gammell: That's great. That's great. You know, I always felt a bit self-conscious, you know, like, so on the Amp Hour, we'd have people who were like, yeah, I was like doing electronics, you know, since I, you know, Dave, my co-host, of course, has, you know, been doing electronics since he was like eight. And I'm like, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just kind of, I took a shot, honestly. Like, I knew, I liked physics. We did some physics in high school. And then I don't, and then I, like, had some old walkie-talkies I took apart. And that was basically, like, the guests that I took. And it, honestly, it didn't work out that well in college. I was much more interested in beer and, you know, talking, talking to ladies. And it was until, like, much later in my career that I actually, like, kind of came back into it and started focusing and enjoying it. Yeah. I don't know. I just feel like if someone is listening who's a college student, you're probably not listening if you're not interested in electronics, right? But if you were listening and you're an electronics student and you're like, oh, I don't know. Sometimes it just doesn't hit at the beginning, you know? I don't know. Like, it didn't hit for me. I got through it, of course. I, you know, I was okay at it. But I didn't really get into it until much later.

Stephen Craig: It's interesting hearing you say that because earlier on in my career, I kind of got, like, FOMO because I was kind of jealous at people who were into electronics sooner than I was. Does that make sense? Totally. Same.

James Lewis: But why? Okay. I'm curious why you would feel that way. What was it that you feel like you were missing out on?

Stephen Craig: The experience and just up with that kind of stuff. It's the same thing with, oh, not just engineering, but, oh, I had it on when Chris was talking. I can't remember what that point was anymore.

Chris Gammell: I'll start talking again. I mean, for me, it's, you know, I look at kids now and I'm like, you know, so I watched, you know, Mark Rober's videos and I see, like, the kits that he puts out. All the, you know, the KiwiCo and all the kits that are out there. The sponsors, this episode is not sponsored by any of them. But, you know, just like the resources that are there. I'm like, oh, my God. I wish it would have. I don't know if that actually would have hit with me. Like when I was a kid, I was interested in sports and like other, you know, and like other traditional, you know, like Thundercats and, you know, the good stuff in life, guys. Power Rangers. And, yeah, so I don't know if it would have hit now, but I look at it and I'm like, yeah, I wish. I think what Parker's saying is the thing that inspired me was like, I just wish I would have kind of. This thing I know that I actually like now, I wish I would have liked it then. Because a lot more time would have been better, you know.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, I feel the same way with all the automotive stuff I do, too. Because I didn't get, you know, I've always worked on my dad's cars and stuff, but I didn't really get into working as a hobby, I guess, until after college. And I see, you know, people these days that are like 16, 17, doing that kind of stuff. And I'm like, it feels like I have to go and catch up. Is that also a good explanation to you? It feels like I have to go harder at my hobbies just to feel like I am trying to catch up with these people. Okay. I know that's not the right mentality, but that's what it feels like. That was earlier on. I've come to reckon with age affects, hits everyone. Okay. The best time to start was yesterday, but the second best time is now.

James Lewis: So, Parker, now I'm starting to be able to relate to what you and Chris were saying. But for me, it wasn't during school when I started studying electronics. It was immediately after I got out of school and I was surrounded by people that had 20 years of experience. And I felt like on day one of my job out of school, I was like, holy cow, I have got to get caught up with everything else that's going on. And I think what you're describing is that everybody I worked with would talk about how things over the last five and 10 years had culminated into a certain product or decision somebody made. And I just felt so out of place because I didn't have any of that context. But for me, that didn't happen until I got out of school.

Dave Jones: You know, I've had actually something. It's funny. It's similar to that. But in the opposite direction. At work, we just had an intern start the other day. And hearing this, I'm going to say kid, talk intelligently about electronic stuff. Sure, I can keep up with his conversation because I've got 14, 15 years on him. But I look at this kid, I'm like, you are so far ahead of where I was when I was your age. I am almost having FOMO of you.

Chris Gammell: I think that's actually the same thing. I think that is the same thing of, you know, seeing the youths and how far advanced they are. But, you know, yeah, it's great. It's good for them, I think.

Stephen Craig: No, I think, yeah, it's really good. That might also just be a personality trait of what was it called? It's not FOMO. It's the imposter syndrome. It's kind of, it's related to that.

Dave Jones: Are you saying the intern's an imposter?

Stephen Craig: No, no, no. You, you yourself, part of this. You're the imposter. Part of these feelings are kind of like imposter syndrome. You're not good enough to be doing the job. I'll put it this way. Anyone listening, everyone gets that. I hope because I do. Yes, totally.

James Lewis: If I ever get to a point where I don't suffer from it, I'll let somebody know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think that's actually one of the reasons why we even go into engineering. I do think our mind is wired in that way, where not knowing something or not feeling comfortable with something or not being capable can drive us insane, right? And so that relentless pursuit of knowledge or capability is part of being an engineer or at least some portion of it.

James Lewis: Yeah, actually, you know what, Stephen, if I think about it, you know, we all kind of said we had this moment where we had this fear that we missed out on something. And none of us said we were afraid to get caught up. It was the feeling that we had to get caught up. Whether that was true or not, that's debatable. Probably not. But isn't it interesting that we all saw that as a challenge and took it on instead of said, oh, clearly this isn't for me because I'm not as experienced as everybody around me or as into this stuff as everybody around me.

Dave Jones: Do you guys ever go into work and just look around and be like, oh, my God, everyone is smarter than me. Like everyone is 50 times smarter than me. Is that just me? It's just me.

James Lewis: You know, it's funny. And I'm really not trying to be conceited when I say this, but I've had jobs where I was clearly the dumbest person in the room. And those are always my favorite. And I've had a couple of jobs where I felt like I was the smartest person in the room. And I really disliked those jobs. They just did not. They weren't as fun, right? I liked being surrounded by people that every time they talked, I learned something. Or I had to pretend like I was learning something because I just couldn't understand what they were talking about.

Dave Jones: I guess let's move on and talk about what our first jobs out of school was. Actually, Chris, would you mind starting us off with that?

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Okay. I might be a little nonstandard. I thought that I was going to be touring with my terrible, terrible band at the end of college. And I did not. And, you know, no offense to the old pals. We're still very good friends, but we were not good. And it would have gone very poorly. But one of them ended up getting into a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins. And so it was like, all right, you should probably go do that. Anyways, I was not paying attention that well. And then I got an interview at Samsung. And Samsung was building a brand new chip fab in Austin, Texas. And they had seen on my resume that I worked on dry etch machines, on the design of dry etch machines. And then they're like, you could be a dry etch engineer. And I'm like, okay. And then they brought you down to Texas and showed you all around and took you out to all the fancy bars and restaurants. And that was in 06. And they've gotten a lot fancier. And, yeah, so I started working at a chip fab without any knowledge. And, yeah, that was a wild ride, you know. Bunny suits all day, all night.

Speaker ?: Oh, man.

James Lewis: That's interesting. I didn't realize that about you, Chris, because one of the jobs I interviewed for out of school was at Austin Semiconductor.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Samsung Austin Semiconductor, because what you just spelled would be ass. Yeah. Yeah. But sass is a very common. Yeah, so Samsung Austin Semiconductor. Yes, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. It, you know, it's really, so, like, silicon processing, super cool. Such a cool experience. I love my coworkers. I got to work with a bunch of people in Korea. I got to visit Korea for seven weeks or other. Super great experience. Terrible, terrible, terrible working conditions. Like, on the Empire, we talked about, like, some of the stuff TSMC is running into right now with moving to Arizona. And, like, they're trying to open a new chip fab. And just, like, the culture clash of, you know, Taiwan people that work, like, 996. And, like, Arizona engineers were, like, no. And I felt that, like, in my bones, you know? So, it's real. Cool experience. Do not recommend.

Dave Jones: Yeah, my first. Real quick, how long were you there for, Chris?

Chris Gammell: I was there about two years. A little bit less than two years. And I was one of the ones that stayed the longest. Except for the lifers. The lifers, I would say, by, of the starting class, probably 20% are lifers. And then probably they had a pretty significant, like, probably 40% were gone within a year. Ruff.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, I worked for an oil and gas company, a pipeline company in Oklahoma after college. Because it was, like, basically it was, like, the first people who would, like, respond to my resume. And I was an instrumentation electronics technician out in the field up in Elk City, Oklahoma, which is in, like, the middle of nowhere near, like, the Texas panhandle. And that was, yeah, that was going out to, the field stuff was actually not bad. I actually liked it a lot. It was having to deal with, because I was, like, the only, it was, like, the company culture, I guess. I didn't really like. It was, like, oh, if you put your hard knocks in, we'll get you a desk job at the Tulsa building. And you can be a real engineer was, like, the term they used. And I was, like, nah. And so I was there for five months. And then I moved back down to Houston. So, but I did learn a lot about just field work. I actually, field work was, like, my favorite thing. But having to drive six hours to go to a compressor station just to flip a switch and then drive six hours back, that was a lot of fun that day.

Chris Gammell: Son, you need IoT.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. No, that was the problem is the IoT part of it went down.

Chris Gammell: I know. I know. Yeah. You always need the backup finger that resets the original IoT. That's what you need.

Stephen Craig: Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, it was an interesting job. It was, you were wearing bunny suits. I was wearing FR2 fire resistance every day. So. Hard hats. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Mine was much more air conditioned, I think. No, it was hot.

Stephen Craig: But it wasn't too bad. Company vehicle. So.

Chris Gammell: So, James, you said you interviewed at SAS. So where did you end up?

James Lewis: Yeah. So I ended up as an application engineer for Agilent based in Austin, which the interesting thing was the year before I was interning at Dell in the server group and absolutely hated what I was doing. Yeah. Round Rock. Round Rock. Yeah. And I really wasn't happy with what I was doing in terms of my team because everybody on my team had stock options that were all worth six or seven digits. So they didn't really work very hard. So I started as I was talking to vendors in the lab, I was kind of like asking people what other kind of engineering jobs are there. And one of the people I was talking to was from at the time HP. And he was the application engineer for their logic analyzers. And he told me all about his job and why it was cool and why I should think about something like that. And I was like, that's really cool. I'd love to get a job like that. Well, it turns out he had just gotten promoted and moved away from Austin. So the following year, they hired me for his job. So I literally got the job. I said, I wish I could get a job like that.

Chris Gammell: Wow. And everybody else, I'm sure, will have the exact same experience. Yeah. Precisely. That is pretty awesome though. Yeah. Yeah.

James Lewis: Yeah. The one thing I wanted to say about that though is that was, I feel like I got really lucky that I talked to somebody other than a, we were talking about traditional engineers earlier. You know, I had no idea about something like application engineering or in this case, a field application engineer doing either pre or post sales support of a product. Now, in the case of test equipment, I think it's pretty obvious the kinds of stuff you can do to support equipment. But then later on, I found you could be an application engineer for components or system level stuff for all kinds of things. And I think that sometimes gets overlooked as an engineering path simply because it's, I think a lot of people think of it as just sales. And while there's definitely a sales component to it, you know, I, I sort of, especially for the first part of my career really stuck to the technical side of it. You know, for a long time, I, I, I couldn't even tell people what a total system would cost. I, I had no idea. I was not interested in any of that, but it was just interesting to me to, that my first job out of school was, I thought I was going to sit behind a desk and play in Allegro or Orcat all day. And instead I drove around the car and talked to a different, a different company almost every day. That's really cool.

Dave Jones: Right out of school, I, it was 2009. And at that point I was just looking for anything I could get and hopped over to a company in, in Houston that did oil and gas sensors, mainly vibration sensors for gas turbines and things of that sort. And I was originally hired on as a hardware design engineer, but frankly, didn't end up doing a lot of hardware design there. Not because they didn't trust me, but just because their design cycles were so long and they had tons of legacy equipment that they just didn't, weren't really designing a whole lot of stuff. So I really got a ton of time with manufacturing. I was, I was very rarely at my desk. I was almost always on the floor doing something with, you know, fixing whatever manufacturing process was messed up or, or in, in improving the processes. And so it was, it was really, I feel like that was a really fantastic experience because first of all, I knew nothing about any of the electronics going into it. I knew nothing about what they were doing. I was just like, great. These people want to give me a job. And by the end of it, I had a ton of experience with, we have a thing in our mind and we want to actually get it built and we want to make an assembly line and we want to make a hundred of them a day. How do we actually do it? That was, it was, it was fantastic. But by the end of four years, I was kind of, it just, it just wasn't right for me. I ended up getting fairly sick of it and I just decided to go off and do something else.

James Lewis: So, so I was, I was actually, I was going to ask you what, what did you not like about it? Or at the end of that four years, why did you, why did you decide to, to move on?

Dave Jones: Okay. So earlier when we were talking about why did you get into school, I started doing audio electronics back in high school. And that was really the whole reason why I even got into electronic or went to get my double E degree. And it was always my intent to make my way into that industry. And I was working in oil and gas, which was fine, but it was just generally boring. And getting into audio electronics is incredibly difficult because it's just super competitive and there's not a lot of opportunities out there. So I said, you know what, I I'll just do it. I'll just make it happen. So I left, I left that company in the first place and started my own business doing audio electronics. Just, I figured it was so hard to find a job doing it. I'll just build a job doing it and ended up doing that for a handful of years, which was really a lot of fun.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. So we all had, we're not doing our original jobs anymore. No, this is a good segue into changing jobs. Like good, good and bad reasons to change jobs. Like for me, that I need jobs, like I wanted to do actual engineering work. I didn't want to be a technician out in the field and I wasn't going to wait two years to do that. And I found, I found a job post for a funny enough, like on the, I wish that it still existed. At a fruit had a job board around like 2011, 2012 era. And yeah, I used that and found a job. I was able to move back down to Houston, but that was mostly, I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. I went to school for embedded system design and I was drawing wiring diagrams and pulling cables.

Chris Gammell: But think about how strong your forearms were getting, you know?

Dave Jones: But wait, you work on car wiring systems all the time, which is just drawing wiring diagrams. That's a hobby. Come on.

Stephen Craig: I can choose if I want to do that or not and not have to worry about food.

James Lewis: So I think, I think there was twice in my career that I, I moved for at the time, a reason I thought made a lot of sense. But in retrospect, I realized it was really silly and it was money. There were, there were two jobs I took 100% because I could get paid more money. And I overlooked so many red flags that I, in one job, I, I was even warned before I went in that I was told I was going to look around and realize that the caliber of people I was surrounded by wasn't the same as I was used to. And I realized that like on day two. And it was only within a few months, I started looking for something else because I knew that I had made a mistake. And one of I, what I found is yes, there are certain times when changing jobs because of money makes sense. But if that is your only and primary motivator, I would really question if whatever you're about to take really makes sense. It can't be the only reason you change jobs.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a, that's a interesting point because I've certainly experienced this and have been, been told this for sure. But if you're looking to get a significant pay bump, most of the time that changing jobs is a good way of doing that. But I, I agree if that's your, your primary motivator, you can very easily step in, in something you don't want to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I wish, you know, one of the things on our list of things to talk about is things we wish we would have known. And I got completely lucky when I made my first job move. It was because I, I had a bad working life balance and just everything was, everything was rough about it. And I wasn't working on electronics, right? It was, I was a chemical engineer, a process engineer, which is interesting, but not what I wanted to do. And, and my buddy who worked at Kiefly told me about an opening and help, help me figure out what I should be studying in order to kind of get through, get through the process and stuff like that, which is really helpful. And I took it because it was just the only thing that was like grasping for like literally, how about this? I am the only person who has ever moved from Austin, Texas back to Cleveland, Ohio in February. That is the only, that is the only, I'm the only person who's ever done that ever in history. So that's how desperate I was. But the thing that was wonderful about it and the thing that I, if I would have, if I could point to one thing that made me successful because of it, it was because I was going to work with 30, 20, 25 analog engineers, like working on analog electronics. And I was like, oh my God, if I could point to that, if I could do that again, if I, and every time I get give advice is just do that as much as possible at the beginning of your career. Right. It's just find as many smart people as you can to work around. And, and if you do that, the money will come at some point. It might not be right at that point, but man, if you can just load up on, it was like, it was going back to school. Basically that was my graduate degree. That's the closest I've ever come to a graduate degree is working at Keith Lee and yeah, working with those, those, those nice, those nice Midwestern smarty pants that I used to work with.

James Lewis: So I want to, I want to dovetail that because I know we're not quite to the point where we're talking about things I wish I would have known, but related to surround yourself by smart engineers, especially analog. I remember I was talking to not an official mentor of mine, but somebody I'd kind of like said, okay, I'm going to use him as a mentor. I said, yo, so-and-so is a really brilliant engineer, but he is so impossible to talk to because he's just so rude and gruff and whatever. And my mentor, my, my pseudo mentor told me he's learned to look past that and just learn from him. And, you know, I'm not saying put up with people that are terrible people. Just, I think one thing is to, sometimes you have to look past a person's personality and listen to the things that you can actually learn from them. And that's, that's something that I didn't do enough of, but I wish I had done more of throughout my career is I let too many times their personality would stop me from wanting to learn from them. And that, that was very silly because there's lots of those people that you can learn good engineering stuff from. And in some ways you can also learn people skills from them because you just sort of not do whatever they don't do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Okay. You know, what's funny about that? I actually turned down a job because of an individual like that. I, I, I once had an interview for a job that I thought was going to be super cool. I, I interviewed, I think three times over the phone across a month. And then they flew me out there and my, my in-person interview started at nine in the morning and I didn't get back to my hotel until nine at night. I interviewed with 10 different engineers. I interviewed with multiple different departments and the CEO of the company. And everything about that job sounded so cool, except there was one guy there that was just a complete ass. And, and he was just, he was just not great to interview with. And, and frankly, I just got a really bad feeling about the whole job because of that one individual. And I turned them down. I mean, I took a flight back and when I landed, they, they called me and offered me the job. I'm like, I'm, I'm sorry, I can't do this. And, you know, you just got to watch out for those kinds of things. And maybe that was a bad decision on, on my behalf. I don't feel like it was though.

James Lewis: Yeah. I think there's a real thin line there, you know, and I think, I think in those situations, you really do have to listen to your gut. People can have kind of a gruff exterior, but they're still good people. They're just kind of, you know, maybe a little bit rough, but when there's somebody that, especially during the interview process that just, just rubs you the wrong way, usually it's probably better to, to go with that because there's something there. And, you know, it's, that's one of those things that, boy, if you get into a job and it's now I've put up with this person, it's, Ooh, I don't know about that.

Stephen Craig: Or that was, or that was the one person that let the facade down.

James Lewis: That's another way to consider it too. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This guy didn't have tact. Wasn't in this guy's book. Let's just call it that way. I remember the person I was interviewing with was in the room or who would have been my manager. And he would call in an engineer every 15, 20 minutes. And I, I interviewed with both of them all day long. And when this guy entered the room, he didn't come and shake my hand or whatever. He walks up to the whiteboard, grabs a marker, comes, puts it in my hand and goes, draw the internals of an op amp. And so like, he just wanted to see. And what was funny was like, I was, it's, it's maybe it was serendipitous, but I studied that actually before going for this. So I was able to answer all these guys' questions, but it's just, man, didn't really like the way you handled that. So what do we name and shame?

Chris Gammell: Let's hear these people's names. Let's call them out right now.

Dave Jones: I actually don't even know.

Chris Gammell: This is why we started doing media stuff. So we can get back at people. You know what I mean? Get back at them. Exactly. 15 years later, you're going to hear from me on a podcast you never listened to. None of your friends do either.

Stephen Craig: It's really funny about this, this, this, that a particular individual like that. My first job at the oil and gas company, when I put in my two weeks, they haven't, they asked me if my supervisor was the reason why, because he was that person that had the, that edge to him, I guess. And I actually, I didn't have that any problem with this person at all. And I learned a lot from him. And I was like, no, this, I don't know why. I haven't heard this in the interview process. You'd be working for this person who's kind of a, you know, an ass. And I'm like, he's an Austin Samsung semiconductor company. And I didn't get that at all. Sure. Yeah. He was a little rough on the edges, but you know, got along with him just fine. And that was the reason why I switched.

Dave Jones: I actually just had a conversation with my boss the other day about this exact same topic. And I was mentioning to him, I was like, you know what? This, this team is really cool. We don't have anyone who's really rubs anyone the wrong way or has just a sandpaper attitude about things. And, and he, and my boss just turns to me and goes, yeah, I don't hire assholes. So why don't we get to the question of things I wish I knew back then? What things you wish you knew back in your first job?

Stephen Craig: I wish I knew what y'all knew, which was go learn with, or go, go get hired by a place that has 20 engineers you can learn from. Cause that's actually never been an experience I've been able to have. Like the oil and gas place. I was always, I was the only.

Chris Gammell: Don't you work at a monster electronics company now in Parker?

Stephen Craig: Yeah. But I'm like the lead electrical engineer. I never, I never worked under someone.

Chris Gammell: Beginner's mine, man. Beginner's mine.

Stephen Craig: I never, actually I do. When we've, when we started actually building the engineering team here, it was really weird cause I was like the lead, but I was the one who was like hiring experienced test engineers.

Chris Gammell: Parker in interviews. He's like, all right, what are you going to teach me?

Stephen Craig: Yeah. What do you, yeah. Interview me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. No, don't interview me. Just tell, pour your knowledge into my brain. That is.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. I like when we, I had to build a test engineering team. I'm like, I have no, I like, I know some stuff about test engineering, but not, you know, 10 years of test engineering. So having to figure out what makes a good test engineer, what makes good processes for all that. Like I had to go learn that from people that have been doing it and I had to hire them. So that was really weird. So I wish, I wish I had that experience of actually working with senior engineers that I was under. That might contribute a lot to that FOMO and, and.

Chris Gammell: Would you like to hire one of us as the senior, senior lead engineer at Macrofab? And then we could tell you what to do, Parker. There we go. I need people to tell me what to do.

James Lewis: Maybe, maybe we could be co-lead engineers.

Stephen Craig: Co-leads.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Stephen Craig: No, I, cause I switched the marketing recently and I'm like, guys, you need to tell me what to do. Like I'm fish out of water in the marketing department. Tell me what to do.

Chris Gammell: Something, something analytics. Yeah. I, yeah, I, I don't know. I wish I would have, I think, I wish I would have gotten started coding sooner. I, I, I think this is something that they, even my coworkers wouldn't have told me. It's just like being more kind of one of the downsides. Maybe this is a good counterpoint to this is. So I went to a place with tons of really in like super deep technical knowledge people. They were clueless though about, they, you know, I, I love, I love them. They're, many of them are still there and they're, they're designing great products, but there are no other places. Like when you look at what other, so this is one thing that scared me away from Samsung as well as I was looking around and there were people that were there 15 years senior to me, you know, who were, you know, senior title, whatever, but they were doing the same thing I was just at, and then they were telling me what to do. And, and I was like, I don't want that. I don't like that, that kind of thing. And, and so then looking at the same thing at a Keithley, where do you go from here? There is no up, you know, like there is no, there is no side. You couldn't even, you weren't even, you know, so you're an analog engineer. You're working on this super high end eight, eight and a half digit DMM, super cool stuff. But like the next thing is to design another one of those, you know, it's not go learn FPGAs because there's no money to go and do that sort of thing. So for me, the thing that I wish I would have known sooner was just like get as much knowledge as you can learn as much in this deep area and then hop, hop to the next, the next hold rabbit hole to dive down. And that's something that like, even now I struggle with it. Right. I, because I think the real hard thing is that you're putting yourself in a position where, you know, as we get, as I get older and I get grumpier and I don't know a lot of things, I'm just like frustrated like all the time. And I'm trying to reintroduce that to my life a lot, but it's tough. It's tough to do that. So, but pushing myself to do that more, I wish I would have known that sooner, you know, because you, you expand and you can do cooler things.

James Lewis: Yeah. I think related to that, I was going to say, I wish I had known to have a plan, but it's okay to change your plan. Right. And so when I first started, I thought I wanted to know everything about designing wide bandwidth, RF amplifiers. And very quickly, I didn't like that at all. Right. And, but I was really afraid to ever talk about that because I thought, oh, then people are going to think I'm flighty. But I think it's important. It's important to know that I have a plan and that that plan can change. You know, I think, I think there's some people that are like you, Chris, that, you know, you want to learn everything about everything. And then there are some people that just want to learn a lot about in one topic. Right. I think I'll bet there are some people who heard you say you could only move in, you couldn't really move upward or was laterally or horizontally, or is that the same thing within a company? But there's, I think some engineers that want that.

Chris Gammell: They want to keep doing the same kind of thing for 20 or 30 years.

James Lewis: And that's okay. And I think the important thing is that's okay. And if that's your plan, then fine. Make, make that your plan. If you want to be able to move around, then yeah, you, you need to really think about how you're going to change, do that.

Chris Gammell: Know thyself, you're saying. Yeah.

James Lewis: Oh, I like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

James Lewis: The, the less serious thing I was going to say is I wish I had learned how to use Git or any kind of version control at some point in my life before the last, like, I, I, I would only say in the last five years, have I actually finally understood how to do something other than Git clone.

Stephen Craig: Git command line still scares me. Oh, yeah. Come on in, man. The water's fine.

James Lewis: I use, I, I use a GUI all the time.

Stephen Craig: I use a GUI all the time too.

James Lewis: Yeah. Unless I find something that says you have to put this magic command in because as much as I love using command line interfaces, Git command line also scares me.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Make yourself uncomfortable. You'll get there. You know, the other thing I was thinking about career wise is I wish I would have bought Bitcoin and Apple at the bottom. It's just. Now you're just coming up.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Now you're just coming up with regrets.

Chris Gammell: I mean, come on. Why not guys?

Dave Jones: I think one of the things that I wish I would have known back at the beginning was how to say no. I said yes to absolutely everything. And I said that because I really wanted to learn everything and just get involved and be useful at everything. And in a lot of ways that made me not useful at a lot of things. It could just, just, I said yes to way more than I could handle. And everyone was willing to give me what I said yes to. And I ended up failing at a decent amount of things just because I couldn't handle it. And, and, and I really wish I learned that quicker to just be like, no, I can't handle this. This is my workload. This is my knowledge base. This is where I'm at right now.

James Lewis: So. I wish I could still learn how to do that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Prioritization doesn't matter if you, if your list is so long that prioritization doesn't even fix it. Right. At some point you're just, you're just always working on the thing on the top of the heap, but the heap never changes.

Stephen Craig: You're attacking every single person that listens and is in this podcast right now. Yeah. Because that was, that was one thing is like having the pivot on that one. I wish I learned that just buying the parts isn't the biggest problem with a project.

Dave Jones: That's a good point.

Stephen Craig: I'm going to shove all these parts further underneath my, my bench here.

Dave Jones: In the opposite way too. You can't be afraid to say no, but you also need to be able to use that appropriately. Absolutely. I mean, there's, there's no words of wisdom here. Just, just learn. That's all I can say.

James Lewis: I think, I think I, I might be able to rephrase what you're putting together is, you know, you need to learn when to say no. Yeah. And it's probably more often than you realize. I, I, I, and I think that's one of those things that I wish I, I, I had gotten better at that early in my career, but that's definitely one that if I look at all the things I could work on at any point moving forward, learning to prioritize and say no is probably always going to be on the list.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

James Lewis: Or at least I hope it is because it means I want to try to learn how to do everything.

Stephen Craig: Prioritize to learn to prioritize.

James Lewis: This reminds me of something somebody said to me when I was, this was my first or second year out of school. Uh, and I'll never forget how weird this sounded. So he called me up, uh, this coworker called me up and said, I'm so sorry. It's taken me so long to call you. I am planning to become more proactive in the future. I just thought, why don't you just do it now? How do you plan to become proactive? That that's like the opposite.

Dave Jones: It's like there's this date where they're like, I am proactive now.

Stephen Craig: Maybe they have a KPI where they can measure their proactiveness.

James Lewis: Proactiveness. Man, that would actually be, how would you measure that? Would, would it be like getting things done without putting them, putting them on your to-do list?

Stephen Craig: No, you put them on your to-do list and then immediately cross it out because you've already done it. See, I started doing that on the weekends and that made my life so much better. And you have a lot less to do now. It makes your list look more impressive. Okay. This is like a, one of those interview questions, right? Um, which is, so, so we talked about our careers in the past and stuff like that and present. So where do we see yourselves in the next five years? And then on, on the flip side of that is what was the answer to that question five years ago?

Chris Gammell: Five years. I would say as for me, um, I'll repeat what I I've told my boss when we, he's brought up career before he's, you know, like, where do you, what do you see your career going in and whatever? And I've, I've said, you know, no matter, no matter what, if, if things go really poorly or things go really well with the startup I work at, and I, I, I think it's going to be the latter, then I'm probably going to be a hardware consultant again, you know? So I think probably designing electronics for people for money. It's probably, it's kind of my goal and talking about electronics with fellow nerds.

Stephen Craig: Yeah.

James Lewis: I think. Go ahead. Go ahead, Parker. No, no, no. Go ahead.

Stephen Craig: Oh yeah. That's kind of where I'm at. I guess it kind of threw a little curve ball when I had to move over to marketing to help out the marketing team here at macro fab. Cause I was doing that. I guess I, I had finally gotten into a position where I was like, okay, we got the engineering team all dialed in. We have a test engineer team. We have quality, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, cool. Now I can get back to like building stuff. That's helping like us build other things. And then I was starting to drum that up and they're like, Hey Parker, you know what? You should move back over to marketing again. Cause I was like, when Steven was at, at macro fab, I was in marketing and I was also like product product and stuff. Anyways, they, I, so I, so I went back into marketing. So that was kind of like something I did not foresee happening again was moving back to marketing full time. They start doing some projects and marketing that allows me to design stuff. We'll see though.

James Lewis: It's always the wish. You can always make demo boards.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. I found is it's, it's really hard to get customers to allow you to take photos of their stuff. Designing stuff that I, I own is easy to take photos of doing that. Make our own content easier.

James Lewis: Yeah. So when I, when I, when I use this five year sliding window, like I didn't think about the five years ago and then five years from now, you know, the one content and every time this question has ever been posed to me, I, you know, I always struggle with, I, I, I can't tell you where I'm going to be in five years. I can tell you where I think I'm going. And, you know, to me, what's, what's continuing to be interesting about my, my path forward is it's, it's always going to be electronics related, or at least today when I forward, something I'm going to be doing is going to be electronics related. Maybe I won't be a content creator in five years, but I'll, I'll be doing something electronic related. In terms of career and making money, there's not a lot of other things that really interest me. You know, I've got plenty of other hobbies that I'm interested in, but I don't want to make those a job or a career. I think that's at least the one con content, not content, one constant that I can see in that sliding window.

Dave Jones: You know, I, I think if you had asked me this exact same question a handful of years ago, I would have probably a lot more specific of an answer saying, oh, in five years, I want to be XYZ engineer doing this particular type of work. And, and as I've gotten a little bit older and throughout a handful of job changes, I'm not really that unfamiliar or scared of making drastic changes to what I do for. A paycheck. And so I think in five years, I'll basically, all I can say is regardless of what I do, I just want to be a trusted resource and a capable engineer at whatever that is. So people can rely on me to execute on what I need to do regardless of it.

James Lewis: You know, you said something, Steven, right at the start there. If you asked me when I was a year or two out of school, what do I, what do I think I'm going to, where, where do I think I'm going to be in five years? I had a, I want to be this title doing this job in five years. And it was probably after about 10 years that I stopped having that as my, my, my end point or my plan. It was, I wanted to kind of, my, my plan became much more broader than this specific position, which is like why I think like today I would have a hard time saying this is the job title I want five years from now. I just don't see how I could, could pick that.

Dave Jones: I think honestly for me, a good day of work is I go in, I, I, I see the challenge that's ahead of me for that day or whatever is required of me. And I execute faithfully. And I feel confident of the work that I did. And I leave. That's like a, just a definition of a good day for me. If, if I can be in a position in five years, I mean, it's not that I'm not doing that right now. It's just, I would like to also be doing that in five years.

James Lewis: So I think the answer to all of, all of us is five years from now, we would still like to be making money doing a job.

Dave Jones: I like that. Yeah.

James Lewis: That's a good way related to electronics, which may or may not be related to electronics.

Chris Gammell: I think it'll probably, that's some good career advice. The definition of electronics is probably going to change for me. I think, you know, you know, I think about what's, how things are different now than when I started, whatever, but yeah. There'll be electricity involved, right?

James Lewis: Yeah. I guess I, I guess it'd be, maybe it's more accurate to say engineering instead of electronics. I don't know. At least for me, I could see. Yeah. Problem solving. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: What I hear James saying is that ChatGPT is coming for all our jobs. That's right. I hear the fear in his, in his voice.

James Lewis: I'm not worried about, I'm not actually worried about ChatGPT taking my job. I'm worried about people thinking they can replace me with ChatGPT. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then you have to fix all their crap. Yeah.

Stephen Craig: That's going to be a good gig. AI fixers.

Chris Gammell: That's going to be the job for many years. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Craig: All right. I have some random other questions here I wrote down right before the start. So what is the most non-engineering job you ever had? And did that influence your decision to go into engineering or taking another job?

James Lewis: I want to go first. You go for it. When I was in high school, I worked at a pizza place. The positive to that is we did everything by hand and from scratch. And it was awesome, which is something I still try to do as a hobby today. But I'll never forget one of the guys that had been, he was a driver. He wasn't even working in the kitchen. He had been working there for, I don't know, almost 10 years. And he came up to me and he said, hey, James, I heard you're going to go to college instead of stay home and just get a job here. I want you to rethink that because they're talking about making you the assistant manager. And you could be making six.

Chris Gammell: Assistant to the regional manager.

James Lewis: Actually, it would have been because at the time I was only 16 or 17. So I wasn't even 18 yet. So it would be a year before I could become the actual manager, be a manager. But he finished the line with, so they're thinking about making you the assistant manager. You could make six or even $7 an hour if you stay.

Stephen Craig: Nice.

James Lewis: And I made sure after that I never had a job where I had to consider that as an option.

Stephen Craig: I had, in college, I worked furthest away from engineering, but I worked for the engineering department. But I was sorting mail, making sure the printers had toner. And so you know where, like, at the end of the year, you always do, there's, like, a survey you do of, like, how much you hated your professor. So I had to go and collect all those and then push them all to, like, the one building on campus that would do all the sorting for that. And what was interesting about that was I got really good at just talking the shop with other people around the campus because the other people had access to the lifts in all the other buildings because the campus I was on was really hilly. And so I got to the point where I never had to actually push the cart up a hill. I knew where to maneuver it to what building I can get to what level to, like, just go straight out around. So you optimized your path? It took longer to push it, but at least I didn't have to push it uphill in 110-degree weather or in snow. I didn't have to push it uphill in snow either. But that was the first thing that I worked for the engineering department was the farthest away from engineering you could possibly be.

Dave Jones: One summer I worked at Walmart in the garden department, and this was a summer in Houston, Texas. And I was the guy that lawn crews would come up and they would order 100 bags of mulch or pallets of bricks. And the entire crew would get out of the car and just sit there with their arms folded and watch me stack bricks in the back of their truck or throw bags of mulch in 110-degree weather. And, you know, I was really skinny then. That was nice. But I couldn't wait to get back to college after doing that.

Chris Gammell: Well, I had very similar, you know, similar kind of experience. I'll talk about a little bit different one where I exited engineering for a while where I went to go work for Supply Frame and I was doing product management, whatever. You know, I love Supply Frame. I love the Hackaday folks, stuff like that. But I was basically, like, learning how to do product management for websites, right? So it was like a, it was right turn for me. And I, you know, I knew marketing sort of through the amp hour and past stuff and blogs and whatever. But, yeah, that's not for me. And so I couldn't, you know, I, like I said, I love working there. I loved, you know, the variety of things. But that was very non-engineering. Even though it was engineering adjacent, it was like I was not hands-on. I was very grumpy a lot of the times. Yeah. I wasn't doing electronics in my spare time because I was so exhausted from the things. I was working remote. Learned a lot of things there, but learned that I really liked designing stuff and got my jollies from building stuff.

Stephen Craig: You know, it's interesting you saw that, you said that you stopped doing electronics for fun as a hobby. When I switched over to marketing, that actually kind of, like, reinvigorated my hobby for electronics. Because I was doing that kind of stuff at work. And I was just, like, kind of exhausted at doing it at home. And then. Yeah, that's a good point.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess I did do. I did contextual electronics around then, though. So there was that. Yeah. I was already doing contextual electronics as, like, the other thing. But then that tailed off, too, because of just other things, you know. So. Yeah. All right. There's only so many hours in the day and how much, like, brain space you can put towards things. Yeah.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, exactly. So I don't have an answer for this question. But if you could have dinner with any famous engineer, dead or alive. I didn't know there was famous engineers, but maybe we can make famous engineers. Who would it be and what question would you ask them? And then also, what are you eating?

Chris Gammell: Parker, who wrote that question? Was that ChatGPT or was that you?

Stephen Craig: That's totally ChatGPT. That's not me. I knew it.

Dave Jones: I like this question a lot, though. I've got a quick answer to that. Yeah. Okay. You don't like this one, Chris?

Chris Gammell: I don't like this one. I mean, it's all right. I'll answer it. I'm here to play, guys. I'll answer it. But you go ahead, Steven.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. I got a quick one. One thing that's fascinated me, I don't know if you guys have ever researched this, but back in World War II, the U.S. was cranking out B-17 bombers. A new bomber every 45 minutes or something like that. I would love to meet the engineer who planned the entire manufacturing facility of Boeing to be able to do that without computers whatsoever. And be able to manage supply chain and all of the processes to get that just right. Holy crap. Yeah. That guy should be a famous engineer.

Chris Gammell: What are you eating?

Dave Jones: Jalapeno lime pistachios.

Chris Gammell: Did they have that in the 40s?

Dave Jones: No other famous engineers?

Chris Gammell: James has got one. He's got one brewing. I can see. Yeah. I can see.

James Lewis: Yeah. I've got one, but it's somewhat timely. It'd have to be Steve Wozniak. There's a whole bunch of Apple II questions I really want to ask him. And in terms of dinner, we'd have to go someplace to serve steak because I want to find out if he actually does use his metal business card to cut steak with it.

Chris Gammell: Go ahead, Parker. I'll go last because I'm still. I'm still on.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. That's the thing is I saw that Chachapiti splat out this question. And I'm like, I like it, but I don't have an answer for it. You know, because I do a lot of car stuff. The engineers that were behind the kind of like how the model, the model A was like the first real ish assembly line for automotive. What that was like trying to set that up. I don't know if Ford was actually behind that or not. I think he's credited towards that, but it could have just been his idea and not. He didn't implement it. I don't know. But that's what I would like to talk to is like how was or I would like to have on the podcast is that person that implemented that's that going from hand fitting everything and having to hand make everything and one off batches to now we are going to try to build an assembly line to just build something that's interchangeable parts. I think that whole interchangeable part thing was something that like fascinated me when I was a kid and we use electronics. Everything is an interchangeable part.

James Lewis: That also fascinated me as a kid because I couldn't see any other way to do it. It just seems so obvious to me that why wouldn't everything be built that way? So to learn that we used to build everything by hand or, you know, one off was it just didn't. It just didn't resonate with me.

Stephen Craig: And I would be eating probably a burger. Burger fries, steak fries, though.

James Lewis: Not a burger place that does it on an assembly line. No.

Stephen Craig: By hand. No handmade burgers. Yeah. Each each French fry has to would come back together into the perfect potato it came from. You know, what's interesting is is we'll see what Chris says. But James is the only person who's actually put a name to who they'd be eating dinner with. I do.

James Lewis: I do. If maybe if you use the question in the future, if you change it to group of engineers, maybe that makes it a little less intimidating because I like both of your answers so far. But Chris is going to have the best answer. We don't know.

Chris Gammell: I've been thinking through, you know, ones that I've quasi idolized, but they're also idiosyncratic, too, you know, like Bob Peace and Jim Williams and all them. I don't I don't think I want to hang out with these guys. You know, I think like like they were experts. I would have loved to learn from them, have a meal with them. Maybe, you know, I think. What about lunch? What if you could have lunch with one of them? Would that make it different? If I could have lunch with a group for like a couple months, that'd be cool. That's asking a lot, I suppose. I guess I'd be working. Can I go right there? You know, I don't know.

Stephen Craig: You know, that's actually, you know, rephrase it to be what engineer you would like to work with in history would be better, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Stephen Craig: We can change the question just for you, Chris.

Chris Gammell: No, it's OK. I don't I don't really have a good, you know. And then there's all the Bell Labs folks, too. You know, like you read like the Idea Factory. That's a great book. Excuse me. Yeah, I think, you know, people in that. Claude Shannon. Sure. Let's go with him. And I'd be eating whatever's. I probably wouldn't be eating whatever's on the menu at the Bell Labs cafeteria because it was probably boiled. You know, cuisine back then was pretty bad. Salad. Jell-O. I've been eating a lot of pudding lately, actually. I've been rediscovering Jell-O pudding. This is here's a fact you guys didn't need to know about me. I have kids, so I've been eating Jell-O pudding and is joyful. I do recommend picking some up.

Dave Jones: Does it bring back good memories?

Chris Gammell: Brings back immediate memories. I mean, I'm having the time of my life right now, guys. Pudding. I got some pistachio pudding downstairs.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Chris Gammell: Ways to sound old. 101. Looking forward to one of this cup of soup. Some pistachio pudding.

Stephen Craig: That's the most bizarre request you've ever had to handle, and how did you make it work? That one I did right, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Champ. Champ.

Dave Jones: Be quick on this one. I once got asked to design the distribution station for a very large weed-growing plant, and this was not in Colorado, and I very quickly was like, nah, I don't want to be a part of this. This does not sound like fun.

Chris Gammell: Would have gotten paid in cash, probably.

Dave Jones: Probably. Under the table.

James Lewis: This isn't super bizarre, but I felt it was awkward. I was asked to hand deliver a, basically a probe. It was like a $30,000 probe to a customer. So I was living in Austin. I had to drive it to Houston, drop it off at their front desk, and then drive it back home. For reasons, they did not want us to send it by courier. It had to be an employee, so I was asked to make the four-and-a-half-hour drive to literally drop off a box.

Stephen Craig: White glove service. I've done that before, though, but with customer products here in Houston. I never had to drive to Austin to do that drive yet.

Dave Jones: I carried a box the other day through our office that had many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of parts in it, and it was not a courier. It was just like UPS that just dropped it off.

Stephen Craig: And it's insured just the basic $100 amount. With a lock. No, it was just a cardboard box. It was like, cool, I guess. I'm actually going to make it like awkward things is when people ask me to work on their projects, and it's not that interesting to me. That might be like everyone here, though.

James Lewis: Yeah, that's a really good time to learn how to say no.

Stephen Craig: Yeah, there we go. Because I have said yes to a lot of those and end up hating myself down the road.

Dave Jones: That's a good way to learn because it's not that hard to say no.

Stephen Craig: I always feel like I'm letting that person down. What I've learned is I try to pivot to be like, because clearly they're asking you for a reason, and it's because they might think you are better at doing it or you have information. And so I try to pivot to be more like a consultant for that project, other than just saying flat out no. That way I don't do the real work. I get to do the fun work of drinking a beer and talking to them about it.

Chris Gammell: For me, I had an internship or co-op really when I was like my first job. I was still in college. And I don't remember how it got out, but one of the product managers, she was very boisterous, and she learned that I was like taking Japanese classes. And so one day she's like, hey, Chris, come over here. I'm like, okay, what's up? I don't remember her name at this point. Peggy, maybe? I don't remember. She's like, hey, come in here. She pushes me into a room, and she says, these men are from Kawasaki. Speak some Japanese to them. And I'm like, oh, my God. I did not do well, guys. I did not do well.

Stephen Craig: Did they land the deal, though?

Chris Gammell: They did. They did.

Stephen Craig: Then you successfully completed the task. They were probably entertained.

Chris Gammell: Because of me. Yeah. I'm sure they were giggling much later about the poor college kid from Ohio. Yeah. Turns out when you bring Japanese businessmen to Cleveland, Ohio, not a lot of things going on there for Japanese language.

James Lewis: Go figure. That's so weird. I would have thought that would be like an epicenter.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Right. Actually, Columbus is, though. Two hours off.

Stephen Craig: We want to wrap up the podcast, I guess?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Stephen Craig: Anyone have anything else to add about their careers or anything?

Chris Gammell: The best days are ahead of us, boys. You know, we didn't talk about content generation at all. I thought that would have been part of it. I guess I should have added that to the list. But we all kind of pivoted to being on screens, talking to other people.

Stephen Craig: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I guess the question would be, you know, would you recommend this kind of stuff in addition to, you know, we're all still hardware, hardware adjacent, interested in hardware, whatever. But is it worthwhile? Should people be considering it as part of their cornucopia of skills that they bring on?

James Lewis: I'm going to just straight up say yes. I think social media is something that's here to stay. It's not new anymore. It's ingrained in, I think, a lot of people that might be graduating from college right now that grew up with it. And I think you need to learn how to present the work that you do. Even if you don't participate in social media, there's like a cultural expectation in the way that you present the information you share with others. Even in, I think, within an engineering group, I think being able to create, to have an idea about how content gets created and is consumable by people is going to continue to be important.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. Even slideshows is content creation. It might not be 100% public, but it is to your peers. I never thought I'd still be doing the podcast after 435 episodes, but here we are. And I enjoy it. This is probably my favorite thing at Macrofad to do. So hopefully it keeps going. Yeah. Chris has 660. It was 666 a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Gammell: 671 this will be.

Stephen Craig: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think look at what people are doing now and assume that, you know, the four of us are talking over audio and it's probably not the medium that's going to be, you know, it's been going a long time, but it's probably not just this. And it's probably not the highest growth rate sort of thing. So I think, yeah, kind of like what James said, be able to talk about your own work, be able to, you know, get your stuff out there, put your stuff on Hacker News, find like-minded people. I think finding community is probably the most important thing there, even if it's not, you don't have to be a content creator in the TikTok sense of the word or even the podcast sense of the word. But I think finding people to get excited about a topic with, and it doesn't have to just be electronics either. It could be, it could be a super niche area. It could be kind of higher level. It could be, you know, generative circuit board design or something like it. Right. But just find your, find your crowd and then geek out, you know, find, find that yourself some, some people, yo.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. Find that forum. That's got that niche.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Stephen Craig: Yeah. That was the macro fab engineering podcast. No, it's I've done that. How many times now, Steven? It's still ingrained. Yeah. It's burrowed into my brain. Thank you for listening. Zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. This is circuit break. Zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. Pew, pew, pew. Editor, keep that in. Editor, keep that in. Thank you for listening to Circuit Break from MacroFab. We were your host, Parker Dolman. And Steven Craig. And thank you, James Lewis and Chris Gammell for bestowing your knowledge on this podcast.

Chris Gammell: Thank you, guys. My brand. Blessing.

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