About 1.5 months ago, I decided to get back and deep into engineering at the age of 40. Why do I say back? My professional career was in finance. However, engineering was always at the back of my mind and somewhat a hobby. Here is my journey and the reasons why I'm coming back.
Born into a family where my father and grandfather were engineers for the food and woodworking industry, I lived in the 2nd lowest tier of our country's public housing. Life was simple but the neighbors were the warmest and kindness was plentiful. Shopkeepers actually recognize you and your family.
Money didn't come easy but my father realized I enjoyed computers as I would park myself for a long time at the computer store that had computing magazines from the USA. My engineering inspiration began when he bought an AMD K6 with Windows 3.1 It didn't come with a soundcard. Internet was on a 14.4kbps. My first game was Wolf3D.
And somehow this help kickstart my engineering mind at the age of 10. How did it start? Because somehow the computer had issues and my Mum would nag at me as the repairman cost a pretty decent sum of money. I've always been taught to be kind. However I felt upset when my Mum had to pay him those high fees, given our family situation. So I started to observe how the repairman did his repairs and picked up on them - starting with the command line. Soon, I was able to troubleshoot on my own. Goodbye repairman.
However, a bigger problem arose. My love for experimentation led me to calling BBS numbers in the magazines. Having 0 knowledge and concept on international calls, I direct dialed these numbers and spent hours on them as my 14.4 kbps was very slow. The hours spent on reading books, articles and forums from proxy, email servers, news servers, anarchy, hacking, scripting, cracking were mind boggling for a 10-11 year old kid. I successfully pulled off several experiments from hex editing, wardialing and even simple scripts.
Within a month, my family got a bill for ~$5000. Huge money back then for my family. And thereafter my free access to the computer was managed actively, the keyboard got locked out. Even though I managed to find my way around the lock out with a mouse (amazing what notepad can do), my computer access was heavily monitored. Hence I saved it for some school projects where I used it to produce work of a better level compared to my peers.
Fast forward to middle school, I manage to find my way in leading the media club that managed the computers in our school. Just like a calling, I went back into tinkering with them. Life was interesting when you had free access to so many computers during computer classes that bored me to tears.
At the end of middle school, I had to wait for our school entrance results. Hence while waiting, I managed to find some work fixing up computers, selling off those hardware and finding a job via IRC at a small single unit computer hardware sales & service company (its still around and grown a fair bit). It was like a dream where one can play with all the latest tech. Overclocking, testing for stability, measuring and tweaking for performance soon became a norm for me.
Finishing middle school gave me a choice. Where should I go? While I wanted to learn computer science, I didn't manage to get in as it was deemed a hot and upcoming field back then. I got into Electrical, Computer and Communications Engineering.
My country could have been more generous in developing our deep tech sector back then. But they didnt. Despite so, I enjoyed engineering quite a bit, having done decently well and enjoying modules such as embedded systems troubleshooting, PLC, VHDL and fibre optics. Often acing and being in the top performing batch of those but unlike those, I wasn't quite good at C programming. I wasn't patient enough and they were cumbersome and quite sensitive to my liking for experimentation. I put some of those skills helping my father in the family business, working on PLCs and troubleshooting CNC machinery.
At the end of my higher level of education, I finished my diploma in Electrical, Computer and Communications Engineering where my individual final year project was to create my school's first course module on setting up an Ecommerce Store based on LAMP + Basic Security such as IPtables. Between Gentoo(I enjoy optimizing), RH and Debian. I picked RH. Between Postgres and MySQL, I chose MySQL. PHPNuke, Squirrelmail and IMAP were all thrown into the module. PHP was still 3.x back then. I still feel bad handing over my work while getting an A as they were just not stable enough for production use. I'm so sure it was buggy as hell.
After that project, I interned through an outsourcing IT company, at a well known but now somewhat not in existence mobile phone producer. While I enjoyed learning systems migration, I understood - perhaps wrongly, the economics of life in my country. My diploma in engineering was not competitive with the foreign labor influx. Salaries were depressed as we as fresh graduates were competing with experienced labor at a lower payscale. Sometime around this period, I launch my first Firefox extension
In the subsequent years, I went to business school. Got my Bsc BA (Hons) and went into finance, graduating in the month of Lehman Brothers collapse. While I still continued to help my father in doing PLC programming to communicating with those darn industrial machines, all while I was developing my professional career in finance. I covered front facing client management, finance and credit analysis to product management and projects in different countries and segments from $50K to $500 mil in credit. Clients from $300K to $1.5b. I got the best employee award and a few firsts in the bank. Through my career, I lost ~$50K because of macro factors that affected my ex client's aerospace engineering business. And it was the only loss in my finance career. Recalling the times back then, it was sad seeing his 7 year business shutdown because I chose this career as I was trying to help small family businesses to be better and grow just like how it helped my family have a better life. I want to help others.
But that engineering itch has always been there. I just feel happy working, and even though sometimes annoyed but yet excited with computers. Having left the family business after trying to create a tensorflow system based on the years of data. I'm here out on my own, wanting to help the underdogs.
I got back into engineering after I let the team go. Why?
Perhaps I'm still traditional in the sense that I, in a leadership position, must have a stronger understanding about tech. E.g. Through my experience I've met devs that told me it takes up a week of manpower to change THEIR typo in the URL, while still charging us triple digits. Despite the bank customers calling me that they need and can't access the link. This happened when I was part of the team that was rolling out a regional online banking system. While not all devs or outsourcing companies act like this, perhaps I could be luckier, but I had a similar case when I had my team (I didn't know they had more than 1 job).
ChatGPT made troubleshooting much easier much easier for me while I learn programming again. While I don't think it can code complex platforms at the moment, online media has shown that the simple ones shouldn't be that difficult for it. And it was fun playing around with my GPU.
I found joy while working and understanding all the latest in tech while I'm on my way to get my startup's MVP out. The development in tech is more "wholesome" where more thought on the DX are finally put into place as compared to years ago. Thing are made to be more "tidy" (that was why I liked Gentoo and Ruby back then) and documentation is so much more accessible.
With my first baby due in a couple of months, I have to find more $$$ as I burned quite a bit with the previous dev team. I'll continue to try to bootstrap my startup. So if you have a job that requires pitching via software demos, finance and banking experience, QA testing, please let me know!
Somehow Vue caught my eye as it wasn't as messy as React or as stiff as Angular. It seem friendlier to newbies like me. And down I went into the rabbit hole. Nuxt, tRPC, Prisma, Tailwind, Mongo/Postgres here I come.
Thanks for reading this long blurt. I hope to find more friends or a mentor in my journey. If you have heart in helping small business or the regular man on the street by reducing and monitoring their short and long term financial risks, ping me and lets work together on this project or just get to know more friends along our journey.
Would love to hear your thoughts, tips and tales, especially from midcareer switches!
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