Eh…no sir, not really.

Be it the yelling outside that woke me or just a feeling. I’m awake. At 3am. :-|. I dislike living in downtown, duh moment right? As you can tell this is going to be yet another freewrite.

Coming up in my career I had different experiences. Once of which was knowing when to leave a company, or rather, knowing when you did not provide value to the company. For me it was always important to understand what exactly my role and my responsibilities were because if I understood them, the company and my manager understood them.

Here’s what lead to this. Right after high school I went to work for a friend (at the time) as a web developer. For the better part of the looooong 3 months I had to make up work just to work. A few art designs here, a few HTML pages there and I was paid. Then it hit me. “What exactly was I doing here?”. Turns out, not much. I was later laid off, yes the first and only time I was ever laid off.

Since then, I’ve learned when to spot these things by asking very simple and direct questions of my superiors. “What role do I play in your team?” and, if Im there for some time, “What stands out to you that I’ve done?”. The questions are not about learning when I might get laid off but rather when im waisting both the companie’s time and my own time.

Yes, I understand there will be peaks and valleys in an engineer’s carreer within a company but prolonged stagnation or working on “busy-work”, I believe, is the same as being out of the technology loop all together. It can be very damanging, long term.

Moving on…

I decided to FINALLY finish my Masters. Yes everyone, school is back at my top priority and If I need to drop a few things in my life to reach that goal and attain it, so be it. Why school? Well, its simple. School doesnt suck and its a better investment for me long term. I find it amusing even sad when engineers say, school sucks. Here’s why. They dont get it, or dont see what’s going on around them (I was also in this group at a point in my life). If school sucks so much, why are companies carving out small chunks of their budget to recruit at college campuses? Why are interns from USC, Cal-Tech, UCLA, MIT, etc etc hired at a much higher rate than non, self-taught, engineers? Why are most managers and positions you aspire to attain filled with engineers with college degrees? Easy, because school doesnt suck.

School keeps you current, keeps you trained and when it comes to engineering keeps your foundation solid so you can set the curve on what will be the next great thing. Its all about understandig the fundamentals and bending them to get thigns done.

Should I go back to bed? Yea but im sure Im not.

Armando Padilla – eh.