what am I doing now
July 24th, 2007 by shinzu
As most of you know now, the start-up I was involved in went under, so some of you might be wondering what I am doing now.
Well, after the demise, I went into interviewing mode for a while. I interviewed with several engineering firms as well as sales consulting firms. During this time I was really going through a soul searching phase. Something I realized is that I excelled in software engineering. At Raytheon, I really had the time to study the academic side of software process and get to apply those principles in perhaps some of the biggest software systems in the world.
My main struggle was whether I stay in engineering or move to technical consulting. Engineering is the hard core discipline of helping create complicated infrastructure software systems while technical consulting would have less development, but more emphasis on the business side.
At the end of the day, I’ve decided to try out the business world more, so I joined a small consulting firm in Irvine. For the first week of work, they sent the new hires to Chicago for training.
In the training, I have to say I was enlightened much by how the business world works. Basically in the technical world, you would make the best technical decision of a software product in order to create the product of the most quality.
However in the business world, sometimes the best technical decision isn’t the best business decision. For example, we have an e-commerce package we buy from a well known provider, and implement it for any large companies that want an e-commerce presence.
I asked if they would consider open source software since it was cheaper for the e-commerce package, but they said that the package they actually buy provides the best business value because it has a reputation behind it. Basically companies would choose you as the e-commerce implementer because you are associated with a good product.
Another interested thing I’ve noticed is things that make money are boring products. A lot of companies are in the business of deploying e-commerce, content management systems (cms), and enterprise process optimization. This is in big contrast to things I have previously worked for, namely software for a navy destroyer, software for an air command control system, and a social networking site. Even though those projects were extremely interesting, there wasn’t much pay for the people actually making the software.
I have to admit that a part of me misses working on complicated software problems, but I think its necessary sometimes to step outside your comfort zone, event career wise to grow a little.