Things learned in 13 (and counting) years

My career started officially in 2004 (or 1997 if you count my IT work at college). In 13 years I have worked for 10 different employers. In 7 years, I have worked for 9 different employers. The longest I have worked for any company has been 6 years, followed by 3 years and just over 1 year. My shortest tenures have been 2, 3 and 6 months. Two places I lasted 9 months. Interviewers in my area always ask if these have been contract jobs. On average, this works out to be just over one employer per year. When put that way, it's an uncomfortable realization, where I look forward to the longer tenure. However, it has also been extremely beneficial and instructive. I have a better idea of how to spend the next 13 years than many of my peers.  Know thyself. And the learning has been phenomenal.

Among other things, I've come to appreciate that: 

Engineering is creative work. It carries the joy of bringing something new into the world. New capabilities. New solutions. All the best engineers I know love this. From your first Lego builds, to model rockets (model anything), to every DIY project we invite as adults, this is the source of my satisfaction on the job. It becomes a craving.

My first long term job, post-graduation, saw me almost overnight go from being a junior engineer to the acting manager of my IT group. It took everything I had to reverse a dire situation and translate it into success and stability. I like remembering how absolutely overwhelmed I was. Some days I was just too paralyzed in thought to do much, and then I figured out the next step and dove back in. And there was order from chaos, it had my name on it, and quite a bit of it survives to today. I’ve spent most of my career since chasing that initial and intense high. There is nothing like having enormous success amidst enormous responsibility and a very real probability of failure early on in your career to shift you into high gear.

In fact, give me a project without much ambition nor real potential for failure, and I'm a terrible worker, unproductive, unhappy, stagnant. I need to fight my way out and up.

High intensity is probably better suited for startups where you where multiple hats as needs evolve, than at an established company or role and task. Contracting can be extremely and frustratingly limiting where you are preventing from going beyond the bounds of the task order.

I like projects with checklists, especially where I have to make my own checklist, and marked off progress from day to day. Good for implementation or troubleshooting. Bad for daily maintenance and operation. I need to believe I have put us farther ahead today than we were yesterday.

Early success is a powerful predictor of the speed and intensity you will bring to and expect from your career. In the right role, this is a recipe for success. In the wrong role, this is a constant source of irritation and frustration, for yourself and those around you.

There is a vast difference between knowing the technology of an existing and limited scope of a model, and having to architect and design a new model from nothing, all the while accounting for foreign technologies and requirements.

Give me an extremely ambitious greenfield with little established process and an impressive list of challenges to overcome. Or give me a massive and crumbling environment, which management has come to accept they must solve, where I get to play firefighter: triage, stabilize, modernize. This is the engineer’s dream -- give me the problem, adequate resources, and turn me loose -- rarely be realized.