21 karma · joined September 10, 2014
Hardware is hard, but IoT is harder. IoT involves bridging the gap between hardware, firmware, networking, security and cloud teams, which makes the challenge that much more complicated. Different teams have different concerns and getting a sense of all these sometimes conflicting concerns is tough.
First time I was brought into a joint venture that was going into the ground as the 2 investors wanted to split. Board meeting 2 weeks into my job, and the decision was taken. They should have never hired my position. Second time was a clear cultural non-fit, I have very consensus oriented and the founder needed everything for yesterday.
I took the 2 packages I had and went into consulting, I love helping people solve their problems, found a new love for tech, that I had lost in a 15 years of management I had done. I picked up new skills from the teams I was working with.
Since then, I have joined partners, developed an IoT consulting business (with a healthy mix of blue-chip clients and startups) and we are about to launch a product in the Agtech space.
The layoffs were a shock initially, and I had a small burnout after the 2nd, but I love people, so I kept going to network with people I had enjoyed working with and I got a first contract 3 days a week.
In short:
- got fired,
- burned out,
- talked to my friends/network,
- got a small consulting job with an ex-coleague,
- learned to love tech again,
- now my business is growing because I surround myself with good people that I trust.
edit: formatting
Side note: the joke goes that Perl is a write only language as it is difficult to read it and understand it. Some twisted souls decided to create the obfuscated perl content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_Perl_Contest
For a list of some of the winners: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0017.html
- Softskill are important, learn how to explain technical problems to non technical people. Try explaining CI/CD pipelines to your non tech friends and see if they understand.
- don't focus on tech all the time, try to understand why people around you are pushing for certain things that "don't make sense" ( there is usually a valid business reason).
- collaborate, don't say no, say "yes but here are the impacts" (it is not up to you/me/or a single person other than the CEO, to know if it is worth it to invest 2 months in what seems like a useless task).
Estimates are not perfect, you should not spend 5 man days to plan 2 months of work. Planning can be done with guestimates and best effort and when done right, are super useful.
Hope that helps.
Personally I had great projects and others were lawyers were involved. But all in all, switching projects every other month, meeting new people , playing with different architectures ... It keeps me sharp and super happy.
Again hope that helps.
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