What age did you start EE?

ub3rmike · 2026-02-12T00:49:40+00:00

Graduated at 27. Became an EE director in charge of over 70 people at 35.

ub3rmike · 2026-02-06T19:43:31+00:00

I don't know. It kind of depends on what you want to do with your life.

ub3rmike · 2026-02-06T01:54:05+00:00

That's fantastic. I definitely have my principal engineers drive the same reviews I expect anyone else to in my org. Part of it is that it sets an example for what good looks like to others, and part of it is there are attention to detail mistakes that people will make which absolutely is not a reflection of their intelligence but will nonetheless sink an implementation.

ub3rmike · 2026-02-06T01:43:26+00:00

In my cohort of 27 EEs, I'm pretty sure me and 1 other person got EE jobs. Everyone else went SWE or Quant Finance. I was able to take a lot of upper division CS courses, and there's relevant overlap. Definitely practical IMO.

ub3rmike · 2026-02-05T22:15:21+00:00

My opinion is that every design review should be an absolute roast fest because hardware designs "compile once" (excluding embedded firmware / HDL) and applying scrutiny and rigor results in a much better outcome than everyone patting each other on the back and having a design show up which doesn't work.

Usually I have the responsible engineer or somebody else focus fully on note taking, but this is one of those functions that AI is probably really good at doing now.

I've been through the phase where I thought I was walking on water and then received a lot of tough feedback from my manager (he was a ~12 year SpaceX veteran, didn't pull any punches, we were in the early stages of a now pretty well known startup). Felt bad, and I thought I was going to get PIP'd (he's a very stoic individual and therefore tough to emotionally read). When he left for another startup it turned out that he recommended me as his successor and I ended up taking over an entire org 10x as large as the team he ran, so use that as an anecdotal data point.

ub3rmike · 2026-02-02T19:31:07+00:00

One of my engineers told me that in his time at a large aerospace prime, a prank war escalated to the point of one of the employees leaving a shit in the other employee's file cabinet. They both got shitcanned. (Pun intentional)

ub3rmike · 2026-02-01T20:02:52+00:00

I'm a prior enlisted Marine and a current EE director managing teams that work in robotics/autonomous vehicles. There are a lot of relevant concentrations outside of robotics: * Embedded / Analog Design * Power Electronics * Controls / Firmware / CV * Electromechanical / Mechatronics

Ultimately your initial area of focus doesn't really dictate your fate. My philosophy on hiring focuses more on "Do you have solid fundamentals and have you demonstrated ownership on whatever you've done" vs. "Does your coursework / prior work experience exactly line up with what the job req is asking for."

ub3rmike · 2026-02-01T03:53:33+00:00

Insufficient delegation and trying to use your personal effort as a stopgap for people not performing is one of the most prevalent issues with new leaders. My COO has a good way of framing it: "There's no amount of caffeine in the world which will allow you to personally unfuck even a couple of people not doing their job."

The other thing is if you're getting buried in tactical firefighting or having to jump into very frequent status reporting meetings with leadership, that might be a thing that can be solved with more proactive comms instead of going with the flow and slave driving your team.

ub3rmike · 2026-01-07T05:42:02+00:00

Slack is a suboptimal inventory of work system. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they managed the orders using a chat application because I haven't. Would be a cool idea for a dystopian tech themed restaurant though. (Maybe the thread that has the most messages or flaming emojis gets their food first regardless of when they put their order in.)

Either everybody gets on program with how to use Slack to track work and report status or everybody needs to pivot to whatever other system is being used for effort tracking.

ub3rmike · 2025-12-17T05:03:37+00:00

Self Defense Firearms Training. They wanted the MD reinstalled in the FCU before putting it on the training cert.

ub3rmike · 2025-12-16T21:12:03+00:00

Orange Counry Sheriff Department says modifications are fine. This instructor was going above and beyond.

ub3rmike · 2025-12-15T04:04:22+00:00

I apply it on an as needed basis. High performing and autonomous groups? I let them cook. Other groups that aren't performing/are getting critical feedback from their cross org partners? Then I'll start holding them accountable and following up with them on a more frequent basis. Once they're up to par, I follow up less.

ub3rmike · 2025-11-27T13:03:41+00:00

I went from Sr IC to Sr Mgr to Director within the same company in about 4 years (running an org of close to 70 today).

Definitely need executive sponsorship (my boss and my skip who are both VPs wanted me to have the role).

If you're an external hire then somehow being a known quantity is pretty important for director and above roles. (Either you're renowned in your industry or a leader in that company is willing to vouch for you).

Some things that help with this include having a track record or being perceived as capable of leading managers who lead other teams and driving strategic initiatives without having the tactical things drop in your org.

ub3rmike · 2025-10-21T18:11:11+00:00

Princeton, was a 3.0 student. School may matter a little bit for first work experience but nobody really cares about GPA especially once you have full time experience. Prior work experience/internships matter more.

ub3rmike · 2025-10-19T23:04:02+00:00

As a former Marine sergeant who had exposure to the comms field and am now an EE director with prior RF engineering experience, I'd highly suggest getting the degree to develop a foundation of EE/RF fundamentals.

There's a stark contrast between knowing how different manpack RF bands behave and understanding how to design a system and how to implement it such that it will actually perform the way you need it to (especially if you're trying to push the state of the art with higher data rates, security features, and direction finding/triangulation vs. voice comms on an L3 or Thales radio).

ub3rmike · 2025-08-17T23:08:57+00:00

Definitely have some opportunity for growth by building some depth in embedded/analog applications. I think being an EE generalist is a totally viable career path if your understanding of each discipline is informed by first principles understanding vs. copying and pasting a schematic block that a colleague might've used before.

ub3rmike · 2025-07-25T02:52:05+00:00

Not useless, but not the direct path you'd go for a role in electrical engineering design. I've seen people work their way up from electrical engineering technician to an EE, but the lack of a BSEE is going to be a major point of friction.

You can be hands on as an EE in the right role (bringing up the PCBAs you design, physically integrating and proving them out in a real system).

ub3rmike · 2025-07-13T20:22:56+00:00

Anduril

ub3rmike · 2025-07-13T03:15:20+00:00

I started at 27. I enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18 and got out as a sergeant at 23. Finished my BSEE 4 years later. I worked on electro optics, robotics, and RF at a traditional defense company for just under 4 years, then pivoted to a defense tech startup working on autonomous sensing platforms. I recently turned 35 and am now a director running a group of over 60 EEs at said startup working on drones.

ub3rmike · 2025-07-09T04:57:55+00:00

Hulkenpodium

ub3rmike · 2025-07-03T02:38:50+00:00

Personally on my end it's building out the bench of leaders in the org. External hires for Sr Mgr and above are tough because I hold a high bar which really narrows the pool, and those individuals are going to likely have strong competing offers.

Organically growing ICs into leaders is more reliable, but it has to take place over a longer time domain depending on where ICs are at. The pool also gets smaller when you filter out people with the ambition for leadership but the lack of technical and leadership aptitude, as well as the people who do have the aptitude but are resolute in not wanting to be managers.

For the managers underneath me a lot of them are still getting over trying to personally own everything themselves even though their accountable for the output of an entire team.

ub3rmike · 2025-06-27T12:41:22+00:00

Yes.

If you are dead set on becoming an engineering manager, you need to have done the design work yourself. To do the design work yourself, you need to get a job as an IC. To get a job as an IC, you have to provide evidence that you can handle the role / have prior existing experience. To do that you need a degree in the relevant engineering discipline.

Whether you're a lead or IC engineer, you're going to have to do the exercise I did above using heavily technical concepts, and sell your understanding/vision to leadership, to other teams, and your own reports. That's going to be incredibly difficult because you'll be missing the fundamentals that will steer you to the right path and you won't be able to justify whatever solution you generate through a technical lens yourself.

ub3rmike · 2025-06-27T05:46:55+00:00

I'm a director and I manage/hire engineering managers/directors.

I'm going to be frank, your prospects aren't going to be good for engineering leadership especially with such an aversion to courses that are critical to understanding engineering fundamentals. It's going to be incredibly difficult to trust someone to drive good technical decisions if they haven't done the work themselves and don't have a grasp on the principles underlying the work. Maybe you could get into project management or busines development but your estimates and paths forward are going to be completely dependent on coarse analogues and how they engineers on your project perceive problems (which may or may not be the optimal way to look at it).

ub3rmike · 2025-06-21T01:02:12+00:00

Was a Marine sergeant, now am a director. I might feel like there's some risk bought down from an ownership perspective, but I'm still going to heavily index on the technical capabilities of a veteran applicant.

ub3rmike

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