| Technological generalist: programmer, project manager, product developer, database guy, etc. Why am I in tech? Partly due to participating in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program and partly because I just took whatever was interesting at university until I was forced to pick a major... when I tallied up my course credits, the shortest path to a useful degree was "computer science" so I did that. Why does my career look like the plot to "Memento"? Because each time I reached a point where my work was no longer that interesting, I looked around and started doing something else. So I went from front-line cast member at Disney World[1], to a university grad, to Java dev for a small dev shop, to Perl/CGI and Javascript at a tech mega-corp, to acquire/process/present data on a trading floor, to semi-retirement, to Japan, to a web-dev shop, to an ecommerce mega-corp. At the moment I don't do any development but that will likely change soon as I miss it. I feel I've been really lucky. I could easy have (and almost did) crashed and burned but somehow it has worked out so far. The trick is to look at every opportunity and ask yourself "if I turn this down and never get another chance, will I look back and wish I had done it?". If so, think hard about what really matters to you and do whatever will maximize that. [1] I took a year off university to go work at Disney on a cultural exchange program. It was an awesome experience, I met my future wife (who was on a similar program) and gained extremely valuable customer-relationship experience. |