I’ve had a pretty weird career, so far.
1.) Life Guard – Piedmont Swim Club
2.) Bike Mechanic – Open Road Cyclery, Syracuse, NY
3.) Product Design/Mechanical Engineering: designed parts of an electronic drum kit, and automated mixing board that was never released – Alesis Studio Electronics
4.) Product Design/Mechanical Engineerin: designed an enclosure for an industrial intercom system, a stadium-level PA system, a DSL modem, and various other thingamabobs – Argyle Design
5.) Scripter, for Seaman, for the Sega Dreamcast: Coded almost half of the game script logic, controlled the facial animation, performed content builds, and managed tens of thousands of audio files – Sega/Vivarium
6.) Teacher, after school robot design class: Created a basic curriculum of an introductory robot design class for an after school program for middle schoolers – Albany Middle School
7.) Mechanical Engineer: Designed and built a crystal growth reactor, and processed wafers for rectifiers and LED’s – The Fox Group, Inc.
8.) Object Engineer/Game Designer: Coded game logic for in-game objects for The Urbz, and designing several critical systems for a new project, to be released later this year – Maxis/Electronic Arts
That’s a pretty weird bunch of stuff, and not exactly connected in too many ways. The gap between Sega and Maxis was about three and a half years, extended from what I thought would be at most, about a six-month stint at The Fox Group. Still, I’ve gotta say that the diversity of experience has been interesting, from being completely swamped under consistent 15 hour days while working at Sega, The Fox Group, and teaching *concurrently*, to having basically nothing to do and sitting on my butt for the last few months of 2003, while my project was cancelled due to a lack of funding.
It’s been interesting so far. I can only begin to imagine what the future holds…
Except for #1, I think that’s probably the most related set of jobs I’ve ever seen in my life.
From my POV, they’re all “mechanically/engineery.” I’m sure I’ll annoy someone by saying so, but software development isn’t exactly on the far side of the spectrum from mechanical engineer.
Before my current career began, I was a paperboy, supermarket cashier, soccer referee, software store salesperson, postal clerk/carrier, freelance portraitist/painter, and then about 8 months of construction.
And my current job has nothing to do with any of that.
In your face! 🙂
Oh, sure – it’s not like for three years I was a hobo, or a beatnik poet (same thing?) – but the post-college career doesn’t really find a “focus” until quite a bit later, and the design aspect of my current job is only maybe 20% engineery, and about 80% creative.
And within “engineery,” it goes from high-pressure, high-temperature vacuum engineering, to materials, to product design – also not as diverse as one can get, but reasonably unrelated, given the same general field. 😛
I mean, once you graduated from school, you’ve mostly been doing one thing, yeah?
In *your* face. 😀
I was sure that A was gonna say that he had done exactly the same things.
I didn’t realize that you worked on Seaman. I loved that game. Any chance of a port to another system (DS!) or a sequel?
My jobs:
grocery bagger
pizza kitchen cook
fast food manager
movie theater usher
retail sales: electronics
busboy
in-home sales: knives (seriously)
valet (60+ different locations)
computer programmer (last 4 jobs)
Apparently I was under the wrong impression that Seppo mentioned his Seaman experience every other day. 😉
Or maybe Chad just hasn’t been paying attention? :p
I almost thought he was being sarcastic. Heh.
My jobs:
– newspaper deliverer
– clerk at parents’ florist shop
– slave for parents’ pool hall
– private tutor
– website developer
– software engineer
Woohoo, fun, remembering weird jobs:
-Babysitter
-Gardener (oddly enough, this HS job made me more money – save truck driver – than any job until I worked at HP)
-Bigrig truck driver
-Bus driver
-Firefighter/EMT
-Electronics retail schmuck
-IT schlep boy for Intel
-IT schlep boy for HP
-IT Manager at dot com (lots o’ fun)
-Acting IT Director for engineering firm
-Redact
-Redact