Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
It has been interesting. I wanted to teach at university so I went straight into a PhD program after my 4 year engineering degree. Found out that being a professor, at least at an ivy league school, was 10% teaching and 90% funding and politics, also did not mesh well with available projects and support, dropped out with “half a PhD”. Worked 12 years at steel mills, the first one sucked but I learned a lot, the second one really developed me into who I am now from an entrepreneurial and leadership POV. Went to business school at night and simultaneously got a Manager job at a shitty company, got fired, got an engineer job elsewhere and quickly promoted to manager where I rocked the house. Left for a senior engineer role elsewhere with better pay and work life balance and I am loving it so far.
Lots of luck, lots of effort, lots of learning through failure and success. Best thing I did was probably business school. The engineering degree is what gets me in the door but the tools I learned in getting my MBA have proven more valuable because most of the problems I need to solve are not exclusively engineering problems.
It was really weird to go from a high performer at one company to getting fired at the next. Thankfully I’ve had two great experiences since then, so I guess it was probably them not me. Getting fired messed with my concept of self worth for a bit but I have worked through that now.
There is always an element of luck, but we do have to be prepared to leverage that luck. Thanks for sharing!