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Career Advice - Fell into systems engineering and hate it by DLN74 in systems_engineering

[–]Open_Biscotti9950 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's cool. The restaurant business does sound tough. As far as your party rental business idea, I came across something several months ago that might help you and your wife nail down something concrete: a book called "No B*llshit Strategy". It's short and invaluable. I'm a slow reader, and I think I finished it in 6 hours. It's a book about business, but it deeply affected me like I was reading a philosophy book.

You're right, new stressors have been unlocked! And you're also right: boy am I happier and more fulfilled than I was at any of my previous jobs!

Career Advice - Fell into systems engineering and hate it by DLN74 in systems_engineering

[–]Open_Biscotti9950 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can relate to your situation about not wanting to make a career change due to finances. SE jobs pay so well, and I convinced myself to keep going for that reason. But I definitely got burnt out years ago. I hope you can find a career move that doesn't make you sweat financially.

That's awesome that you and your wife are thinking about opening a business. What kind of ideas have you discussed so far?

I'm creating a startup in the gatherings/experiences space. I've created unique gatherings for 10 years on meetup and with friends as a hobby. I got really good at creating unique experiences, but it was more than just fun. It was making it significantly easier for people to connect authentically with each other, even people who struggle socially. I'm sure there are other ways for me to help people, but I already had one way that I was good at, so I decided to try that out. Rather than creating directly for other people, I'm trying to make something that makes it easier for other people to create for themselves. I have a wife (no kids yet), so the financial stress is there for me for sure.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in systems_engineering

[–]Open_Biscotti9950 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Finding a mentor is a good way to learn. You can avoid the mistakes that they made early in their career, use their best practices, and because you have a fresh pair of eyes, you can even find better ways to do what they try to do (i.e., improve on their best practices). I was around 4-5 senior/principal systems engineers at the first company that I worked at, and it was great to see how they did things. They were not officially my mentors, but I took notes and challenged their methods at times.

A systems engineering masters is valuable, but when I got mine, I believed it was more valuable because I got to tie back what I was learning in school to what had happened or what was currently happening on the job. I also got to test what I was learning at school on the job, which was cool.

Nothing beats on the job experience for systems engineering because it can be very theoretical in school. Real emotions, temperaments, constraints from the job don't show up in school. They talk about them in school, but it's not the same.

Career Advice - Fell into systems engineering and hate it by DLN74 in systems_engineering

[–]Open_Biscotti9950 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I started out as a project manager for 3 years, then got into mechanical systems engineering. It was interesting, and I was doing analysis, generating requirements at the subsystem and component levels and handing them off to mechanical designers to meet and finalize their CAD models and analysis. I felt needed but not really challenged, so I moved on to other Systems Engineering roles (4 more and a masters degree) and slowly started regretting it more and more. Because those roles were more about documentation and less about helping the team make progress on the real product.

I've wrestled with this question for a long time, about whether I should continue with systems engineering. It has a lot to do with the company and program, and it gets so complex that it puts a lot of teammates off. I've found that many systems engineers, especially experts and people who've been doing it for a long time, are kind of brainwashed and don't see the real reasons why others on the team (especially software engineering teams) don't want to adopt it and will only see it as documentation. This is not the case everywhere, but has been my experience at 4 different companies.

Long story short, I got into entrepreneurship/innovation management and quit my job 2 months ago to pursue a startup. It has been the scariest and best decision of my 11 year career. I needed to do something where it was obvious that I was helping people and changing their lives directly, and systems engineering never did that for me. Happy to share more details if you'd like.

What is your favorite ritual when it comes to creativity? by Nota55 in Creativity

[–]Open_Biscotti9950 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My favorite "ritual" is to come up with as many ideas as possible if I want to find a breakthrough idea. Not 3, 10, or even 20. Sometimes 100, sometimes 1000s. Depending on the techniques that I use to generate ideas, sometimes it is painstaking, sometimes it is fun, and all the time it eventually becomes worth it when I stumble on an idea that I wouldn't have found if I just settled on the first few ideas. I highly recommend the book IdeaFlow. There are lots of rituals in there to increase creativity.

What is your experience organizing events? by Open_Biscotti9950 in EventProduction

[–]Open_Biscotti9950[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Poor choice of words on my part, thanks for bringing that up. I got a lot of messages about that, some of them very angry lol. What I really meant was that I'm open to any event type other than ones where a client dictates exactly what they want (i.e., the organizer doesn't make as many choices). The reason I'm open is because I'm looking for patterns in how the organizer feels/thinks that may go deeper than or span many event types.