Hi, and welcome to the Neil Ashton Podcast.
In each episode, we explained some of the fascinating ways
that science and engineering are changing the world around us.
We talked to leading engineers from elite level sports like
cycling in Formula One to some of the world's top academics to
understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning, supercomputing
are bringing in a new era discovery.
We also hear some of their life stories, their career advice,
the lessons they've learned on the way that I hope will be
helpful to you too. So sit back and enjoy this
episode. Hi and welcome back to the Neil
Ashton podcast. So I thought we'd do an episode
sort of career advice in a way episode for people who I didn't
see it already. I did one in the first season,
which was essentially more of an academia versus industry
question. I'll, if you're, if you're on
YouTube, I'll, I'll try and put a, a link to it here.
But if you're listening, you can just search for it.
I think it was in the first season.
I can't remember which episode now and but you know, I had
pretty positive response that people find it useful, you know,
at different career levels just to give some of my personal
opinion and things that I've observed and learnt along the
way. But I thought in this episode
maybe we would just focus purely on the industry as a non
academic job, so not university or sort of classic research
positions. Might do that one again, let me
know if that would be interesting.
But I thought just give some personal observations that and
things that I've learnt along the way that maybe I wish I'd,
you know, known in the past. So I'm going to try and cover
maybe four or five things that I think would be useful to know
for someone who is looking to get a job in engineering to
understand about potentially different roles and options and
the the different markets. So sort of companies, job roles,
career progression. And then maybe a bit of a deep
dive on actually the tech sector, something that obviously
I work in and some people have asked me, you know, to, to
understand a little bit more about what sort of roles are,
are available and, and what it's what it's like.
Again, caveat, this is just my opinion.
I I'm living in the UK. I'm going to have a sort of auk
slash US bias to, to all of this.
So if you're listening from a different country, apologies if
some of this isn't as relevant to you, but I, I think most of
what I'm talking about hopefully, hopefully is.
So we'll, we'll, we'll assume that we're basically that you
have some form of degree or you're about to, to, to, to
finish degree. I appreciate that there are
roots without having a university degree, but maybe
that's for for for another episode.
So I'm going to assume that you have some sort of engineering
degree. Well, it could be computer
science, it could be a more pure engineering, it could be sort of
more mathematical physics. But let's say you're sort of
interested in something I would call relate to engineering,
Although to be honest, engineering is a very broad feed
though, and you could include software and mechanical and
aerospace. But anyway, let's not get too
much down a rabbit hole straight away.
And so I'd say the first thing that you should consider is what
sort of company do you want to work for?
And the way I would tend to split this up is you have large
enterprise companies like a Rolls Royce, an Airbus, a
Siemens, an ANSYS, companies that have 10s of thousands maybe
of, of employees. And then you have start-ups,
which probably are the complete other end where you may only
have 10 people, but often in a very fast moving, innovative
sort of exciting way. I would say there's then what
some people would call mid market sort of smaller
enterprise where you may be joining a company that has, you
know, a hundred 200 people. So quite a different sort of
company like that. I'm trying to think of examples
like, I guess even a Formula One team would be sort of considered
like that. I mean, maximum 800 people.
I wouldn't call that an enterprise.
Could be, and I'll explain later why.
And then you have what I would sort of call SM ES, sort of
small and medium businesses. So these are sort of the catch.
Anything in between I, I, I suppose where you're going to
have something that is more than probably 10 people, but less
than than sort of 500 people. And what I've observed is that
they all have the sort of pros and cons.
If you're going into a large enterprise company, let's say
like one of those big sort of engineering giants in, in, in
the UK or the US or Europe, they often have graduate schemes.
They often have schemes that help you to progress within the
company and it's very common for someone to join one of those
sort of companies and be able to move around a lot just within
that single company. So if you join, let's say, doing
aerodynamics or, or, or, or CFD or like a fluids person, usually
they have the ability that if you wanted to move more into,
let's say project management or, or into some other area, there
may be options to do it because ultimately they want typically
to stay in that company. And so they're happy for you to
move around. So in some ways the advantage of
that is you have a lot of ability to move sideways and,
and potentially upwards because it's such a large company and
they typically have very mature schemes on training and
development. So particularly if you're a sort
of early career, you'll have a lot of help to, to progress a
lot of continuous professional development and just, you know,
lots of support because ultimately these companies want
to keep you, they spent a lot of money, you know, employing you
through the interview process and they're quite well set up
for that. So that's the sort of advantage
of that. They, but maybe the disadvantage
is that they can often be such a large company that they can be a
little bit more sort of bureaucracy.
And what I mean by that is there's a lot of sort of
processes and, and tickets to file because they've had to
scale out, you know, maybe they have 100,000 employees.
So that can sometimes mean that it's harder to know face to face
people because you may just be speaking through a, a ticketing
system to speak to somebody at, you know, within HR or, or if
you want to do something IT, you can't just go to someone's desk,
you may have to file something. So they, it's sort of a
different vibe, I guess. But particularly at an early
stage, they can be quite useful because the game there, they
want to to help you. Now let's go to the complete
other one, which is let's say a start up.
And again, I'm probably thinking a little bit now, maybe we're
starting off, if you're sort of more early career, the
enterprise one, as it said, graduate schemes sort of safe.
They, you know, will help to nurture you.
They're looking more for your long term growth.
Let's contrast that with the startup where you're essentially
joining a company that has to work as quickly as possible to
deliver something because of the way that they're funded, often
through venture capital money where they've got 125 years to
to deliver something. And so that is the complete
opposite side where the expectation is, you know, you're
working night and day to deliver something, which actually can be
quite exciting because you may only have 10 people working.
You're all maybe in one, you know, location or getting on to
it. There is no bureaucracy per SE.
If you need to go and get a laptop, you just buy one.
If you need to do something, you just do it.
It's complete opposite side. And often they do look for sort
of hungry, excited graduates who have just come out.
Let's have a PhD or maybe even just a normal bachelor's or
master's degree, but you're not going to get that sort of, you
know, continual professional development that that sense of,
you know, slowly helping you to do it, courses, training, you
know, you may have three months to ramp up.
That's, that's, that's not the way it's going to be.
So you're going to be on the other end.
But the positive thing is if the startup does well, you may have
been given shares, you could financially do quite well out of
it and you have a buzz of having, you know, delivered
something. And in for some ways it can be a
way to very quickly gain knowledge and reputation and can
help you to then move on to other career paths because
you've had to, you know, so quickly do something and the
startup is very exposed. So sometimes, particularly I see
in the US going to join startup can actually be quite a strong
move for, for, for let's say an early career person because it
gives them a, a sort of very rapid head start.
And then I'd say, you know, the sort of mid market, the
companies that have are sort of in the middle.
I, I guess, you know, you're not joining such a massive
enterprise company, but you're joining something that you know,
will help you out, but maybe is the best of both worlds.
You could sort of say that where it's small enough that you might
have a strong community of people.
You would, you would know, you might have a, you know, a small
team, but there's enough people within the organization and they
still want to sort of look after you.
And there is, you know, career progression either way.
And as small as the SMB business.
It it's sort of again, a little bit closer to a start up that
often the, the funding model and the career means that, you know,
they can't afford to be having lots and lots of staff.
But one thing I didn't mention is in terms of responsibility,
sometimes, and I think people who work in Formula One would
find this, that there's always a difference between ownership and
responsibility. And sometimes when you're a,
let's say, you know, early graduate, you're quite happy to
be given a very small piece of something to work on and that's
yours. But the other time, sometimes
you think I'd like to be working all of it.
So as an example, you know, if you're working in some very
large engineering company, you might be responsible just for a
very, very small part of, let's say, that aircraft design or
that car design, or that that that industrial a piece of
equipment or whatever, whatever it is.
Or in a software company, you could be a software development
engineer just working on a very small part of an overall
product. But if you're in a smaller
company, you may actually be responsible for, let's say,
designing the whole car, or you may be responsible for writing
the entire application. Now, probably by definition,
it's not going to be as complicated because if one
person can do it versus needing 500 people, it's obviously a
different product. But there's a difference between
sort of the ownership side of it.
And that can often be something and, and one reason that people
switch between sort of large companies and small companies
because they feel they want to have, you know, more ownership
or more, more scope to take of a whole thing rather than just a
narrow fix. So the classic example would be
in Formula One, a lot of people that when they start, you know,
they're working just on a front wing flap or maybe less so now
with the new rules, but something very specific.
Whereas if you join, let's say, a smaller engineering
consultancy company that's been asked to develop an aero kit for
a whole car, you may be asked, right, can you do the
aerodynamics for the car? So it's a very different sort of
job. Pros and cons on, on, on both
sides. But then there's also an
interesting one, and this is maybe where I see and probably
not as well known, but this barrier between what some people
would call sort of traditional engineering companies.
And that's some of the names I've mentioned then like, you
know, your Rolls Royce and your hairdos and all the others.
And then what I would sort of call the sort of more slightly
newer in a way, but commercial or tech companies that actually
are increasingly doing more of the engineering that the
traditional engineering companies would do.
And what do I mean by that Is there are consulting companies,
you know, like your Cap Gemini, PwC, I'm probably going to
forget the names of these companies, but all these sort of
large consulting companies that actually do.
And, and I guess you could call companies like Arab as well in
that when they have specialist teams knowledge that help
perhaps some of these big engineering companies to do some
of this work and they either are essentially outsourced to that
company or they provide expert sort of guidance into that
company. And we could probably go into a
bit of a deep dive into this and this whole idea that large
companies are quite slow to innovate versus sort of smaller
or, or companies that are focused on on that.
So there's actually a lot of jobs for people to move into the
more consulting space. And this is sometimes a little
bit of a controversial topic, particularly the stereotype is
that some people when they finish their engineering degree
will will not go into quote UN quote, a traditional engineering
company and will instead go to one of these consulting
companies because there is perception of, you know, greater
money and a bit more of a sort of commercial sort of
environment. And, and to some extent that is
probably true. Certainly in the UK it is, maybe
it's less so in other countries, but there is this sense of these
consultants companies that quite often, let's say they're based
in London, again, sorry, bit of Auk centric view here.
And they can be a bit more exciting because you may be paid
a bit more. You're living in the city,
you're sort of working in a more commercial environment where the
sort of stereotype of going into the engineering company might
be, you know, you're in a factory in the middle of
nowhere, which is sort of true. But there are, you know, lots of
pros of, of working in those engineering companies,
particularly if you really, really love sort of engineering.
Now those companies are realizing that and they're
obviously trying to change. So the engineering companies,
the traditional engineering companies are trying to, you
know, attract younger talent and then trying to show that they're
more innovative. And I think that is certainly
becoming the, the, the case. But I say it because from a
career point of view, if you're looking, let's say on a job site
or, or or for places, if you're into, let's say mechanical
engineering or automotive or aerospace, there are there are
other options than just the big traditional engineering
companies or even some of those. And now we can get into what I
would call this hierarchy maybe. And hierarchy doesn't mean good
to bad. It's just in terms of the way
that they do it, the there are many, many opportunities and
companies that supply to the big companies.
So you know, you don't have Airbus may or Boeing may sort of
appear to be the aircraft manufacturer, but in fact there
is hundreds or thousands of companies that develop sub
components for them. And and actually the large
company outsource quite a lot to it.
So it very dependent on the company.
But it's not the case that to work on aircraft design, you
have to work maybe at a Boeing or Bombardier or or Embraer or
or Airbus or whatever. But there are sort of Tier 2,
tier 3 except companies that will build the landing gear or
the components or, or or again do consulting advice to those.
So there's, there's far more of those companies and sometimes,
and this depends on the sector, it can be a stepping stone a
little bit if if you wanted to get into the big company, but
for whatever reason there wasn't a job available, then there are
options to obviously go to these sort of smaller companies,
sometimes smaller to gain that experience that you may then
want to have the experience to go up.
And, and that's certainly true sort of from a motorsport
perspective, the classic example being people want to work in
Formula One. There's only a certain number of
jobs in Formula One, so either you just keep applying, but what
do you do in the meantime? Well, actually then there are
lots of companies that are sort of side auxiliary to to Formula
One, have a lower Formula One series or companies that provide
things to the Formula One teams. And this is probably where the
software side comes into it. So again, I suppose I'm, you
know, maybe most people listening to this I assume are
probably more engineering type people, but maybe some of you
have also done a little bit of what I've done, which is
appreciate that nowadays engineering is very much a
software driven industry. It's very much a sort of digital
industry. And that is of course why there
are so many software companies, software companies doing a whole
range of things that increasingly have much closer
links to engineering. And so for example, they have
the very large companies, which I would still call them now an
enterprise like Siemens or Ansys or Cadence or DASSO or or the
others which I'm probably forgetting to mention.
These are extremely large companies developing a whole
range of software that has, you know, is explicitly designed to
some extent for engineering. And so engineers are very
attractive both from a software engineering point of view, so
developing the software, but also we'll we'll come into this
in a minute in terms of job roles, they want people with an
engineering background to be able to either sell the product,
develop the product, research a product.
So, and that is a very, I would say, growing industry to the
point it's probably growing faster than the traditional
engineering. And it's also true that many,
you know, if you were to go back 40 years ago, those engineering
companies would have probably developed their own software.
So if you go back and look at the, you know, old school
Lockheed Martin or. Or, or Boeing or BA systems or
whatever that was before it was BA systems or, or certainly in
Germany and France and, and, and probably in Asia as well.
And all around the world, 40 years ago, you basically had to
write your own code because there wasn't first of all, you
know, computing and software was far, far different and you had
to do it really yourself. If you Fast forward to now,
there's a whole multi billion or trillion dollar industry for
software to the point that increasingly companies are
making a decision not to develop their own software, but instead
to buy the software. And increasingly also, and you
know, people know that I, I used to work at a cloud computing
company. It's, it's the same, it's the
same for that, that increasingly now even in terms of buying your
own hardware or data centres, you're looking to sort of
outsource it to another company, which means some of those jobs
are being shifted to those other companies.
So I would say the biggest thing is the idea that engineering is
transitioning from the traditional companies to sort of
the more digital or software companies.
Now, that's also why many of these traditional engineering
companies are trying to redefine themselves as software companies
because they realize that that really they need to become more
of a, a sort of software company than just a hardware company,
particularly because of the way the the the world is working.
And I've made a note down here that I'm going to definitely
talk about AI because that is a certainly a big one when it
comes to the job market. But OK, so that's the companies
and I'm I'm purposely not mentioning lots of specific
names because it's just so country dependent and and
industry dependent within, you know, the engineering sector.
But hopefully that's given you at least what I would say is the
sense of the different companies that that you could potentially
join or work for. But what about job roles?
And, and again, some of these people will know and be obvious.
There's some stuff that I don't think I knew actually before.
So I'm hoping maybe some of this might help.
So you do obviously have your sort of traditional quote UN
quote engineering roles. But what really is an
engineering role? It's actually, it's quite, it's
quite different. I would, I would sort of split
it that you have engineering roles, specialist engineering
roles. And what do I mean by that?
I mean domain specific. So in quite a lot of companies
you'll have a fluids group, A structures group, A sort of
battery group, you know, sort of more maybe the, the chemistry
side of it, sort of a noise group, maybe looking at water
and, and, and soiling. They'll be a manufacturing
group, they'll be composites group, there'll be a sort of
physical testing group. They'll be and they would hire
specialists in to them and that's where you would typically
find doing a PhD would be useful because they might want a fluid
specialist in in that group. Now that is obviously dependent
on sort of the company and a very large enterprise company
may have hundreds of people in a dedicated fluid sort of group.
And you know, Oh well, like a Formula One team in aerodynamics
division where you maybe have hundreds of people just in
aerodynamics. And that this is sort of linking
to my first point about companies.
And if you are in let's say one of those, you have sort of
career progression within that, you know, oh, I could be a
junior aerodynamicist or senior aerodynamics, principal
aerodynamics, etcetera. But if you then go into a, a
smaller company, perhaps maybe there's only one aerodynamicist.
So that aerodynamicist in some ways needs to be potentially
more rounded and qualified and given much more responsibility
because there's only one of them.
So it there's a potential career move from, let's say one of
these big companies where you were one of 100 to just being
one because you may find that exciting because you're owning
all of it. So this is where there's always
a bit of movement between. So I think there's sort of
specialist engineers and then some people find that, well, you
need engineering managers because somebody needs to manage
it. And that actually is in itself
its own sort of job role and skill.
Managing people, lots of people is a full time job and is not
just a a sort of thing you do on the side, at least for good
companies. There's also a lot of sort of
project management jobs and this is where some people find that
they actually really enjoy organizing things and doing
things, but don't want to be deep diving in one particular
sort of sub domain of fluids or structures.
They just they feel like they're an engineer.
And some people like either become therefore more than
engineering manager. There are in some large
companies that what they call some chief engineers or
assistant engineers, but these are people and there's a
borderline between I guess project management and
engineering management. But certainly I see that in in
some of the large sort of Rolls Royce tech companies where these
are the, these are the people who are supposed to look at the
bigger picture. How do you deliver that product?
How do you actually get that thing out and you need to manage
or organize or direct, you know, some fluids analysis here, some
structural analysis here, some some manufacturing analysis
here, some maybe market analysis here and you're coordinating all
of it. And that actually is it's own
typical job family. They often the big companies are
sometimes the ones to get that because they will train you up
in how to do it and sort of movie between projects.
Certainly that's the case that some of these large like the
Rolls Royce, the Hebbels, the Boeing, well, they'll sometimes
almost have like schemes to identify people like that.
Then I think it's important to note that some people actually
like to go in to more of a sort of cross in the middle, which I
would sort of call maybe technical marketing where you
it's a marketing role, but it's you've come from a technical
back background to do that marketing role.
And that's very common actually in software companies.
So if you look in all the tech companies, there are hundreds or
probably thousands of jobs or what they call like product
marketing or technical marketing and they're looking to hire
people with a technical background.
It is not a pure marketing job. You need to understand the
technical side. And often it's people even with
PhDs or things. And that can actually be quite
exciting for some people because they may like sort of a
different side of, of, of work, not just pure engineering.
And they may enjoy the sort of marketing and sales.
And so that is actually something that is worth thinking
about. You can still stay technical,
but go into these more technical marketing roles.
And like I said, in the software world, that is increasingly
becoming quite a big one. The other one, and I'm saying
this because I feel like some people leave engineering because
they think, well, I'm either just an engineer that has oil on
my hands or I need to get out and do something else.
And sort of what I'm saying is you can be an engineer but do
many other things. And so a good example of that is
sales. So some people may like the
idea, they may be driven more by a sort of commercial mindset.
And some of those may be for, you know, I just need to leave
engineering and go and work for a sort of financial institution
or go and work just just outside or not even do engineering.
But actually in many, many companies, and again, a lot
software companies, certainly true, they need people to sell
that software, but you need people who are technically
minded to do it as well because often you're talking about
complex stuff. If you're trying to sell a piece
of software that can manage all the manufacturing components or
some sort of, you know, fluid dynamic software, you, you sort
of need to know the area. So there's a whole load of
positions and jobs in sales. And some of that is what they
call business development. So it's more the strategy of how
you would do it. I think what they call go to
market or GTM phrase I'd never heard before, but it's it's very
common once you're sort of in the in the software or tech
market. And then you also have pure
sales, which often they're sort of quota driven.
So it's, you know, I need to sell this this much a month.
And some people really love that because it's sort of exciting
because you're, you know, you're, you're trying to get to
target and there are things like account managers.
And you have this again at in consultant companies or software
companies where you're sort of managing a customer or a set of
customers. Now, one of the big job families
obviously is software development engineers.
And so they often call them SD ES.
And that is something that has sort of blown up and something I
definitely was not aware of when I did my sort of traditional
engineering background. And what do I mean by that is
again, because of the software need and they do have them.
They do of course have these in these engineering companies, but
definitely, definitely in the big tech companies.
There are thousand 10s of thousands of STS software
development engineers who are there to develop code.
Now, some come from a computer science background, but many
also come from an engineering background because you need very
strong programming skills. But also it's useful if you have
some sort of mathematical or engineering background.
And engineering tends to be a good thing for problem solving.
And there is a huge market for this, whether you're talking in
the the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Nvidias, all
those sort of tech companies and other ones like, you know,
Netflix or, or or whoever else to write code.
And there is A and I can talk about this maybe in the in the
next section about the sort of tech sector.
But this is really interesting for or career option for sort of
engineering graduates. And even I know people who have
in so much retrained to go into this.
So even if you're have a job, you may find it quite
interesting career path to go down that route.
You may have to retrain in terms of, you know, developing your
coding skills or software skills.
But it's a very interesting market that I think with the
rise of AI is becoming one of the sort of dominant job type of
positions to have. OK, so now maybe let's turn to
something I mentioned before, which is the the tech sector and
how I think this is actually increasingly becoming an area
very relevant to to engineers and is only going to grow for
for two reasons really. One is that there is a move to
digital engineering certification by analysis and
that is true across the whole of the engineering sector.
Whereas aerospace, automotive, defence, manufacturing,
industrial, really any of those industries are increasingly
using software to define, to develop, to test their their
products. You've all heard of things like
digital twins. And of course, and this is an
important and AIAI, whether you are a big believer in AI or a
bit of a sceptic, is becoming a huge thing for all engineering
companies. And that is a great opportunity
for for jobs. There are many opportunities,
whether you're in the large enterprise, I spoke about the
the small ones, the start-ups, some will develop in house, some
will buy in. So regardless of what they do,
there are many opportunities for software jobs, which is
typically developed by tech companies.
Of course, tech companies do more than just develop software.
They also sometimes develop hardware.
And so there is a blurred line sometimes between that.
But, and again, some of you listening will, will know this
very well. And so apologies maybe to some
of you, but there maybe some of you are not so familiar with
this. And so I'll, I'll say it anyway
and, and hopefully it's useful. So what do I mean by the sort of
tech companies? Again, I was not aware of this.
I will put my, my hand up. I was not fully aware of this
probably, you know, 10 years ago or, or even 7 years ago, I
wasn't fully aware of this whole sector actually.
So, and, and that's probably because it's traditionally being
a more US centric industry. And you know, being in the UK
myself, it's maybe has only more recently become a bit more
known. And still though, I don't think
isn't that known. And I think that's true for,
for, for Europe and, and the rest of the world.
So there are companies like Amazon, like Facebook or Meta,
like NVIDIA, like Google, like Microsoft, Oracle, trying to
think of other companies, you know, those are the sort of big
ones, I guess now, of course, open AI, etcetera.
But if we take the, the, the, the big companies, what do they
do? And, and by the way, there is a,
there is an acronym Fang, which I, I should have researched this
actually, maybe let's, let's do some live Googling.
So it was Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet.
That was the traditional one. Of course, now Meta, etcetera,
but that's just sort of an acronym.
And then I think they call it the is it Magnificent 7?
I think I've heard that phrase used.
But anyway, the, the point is there are these sort of big tech
companies, but there's many, many others and the sort of
start-ups increasingly that sort of blur the line between it.
But what do they do? Well, of course, if you look at
something like Meta, you know, obviously they develop Facebook,
Instagram, WhatsApp, but they have a lot of research teams and
they have products that they they make as well.
And so physical products sometimes that's certainly true
with, with Amazon and and Google, who obviously have
devices. So they have to, you know, make
devices, but they develop software.
And you know, I used to work at a cloud computing company, AWS,
and of course they have a huge base of employees, you know,
hundreds of thousands of people who develop software and you can
use it through sort of a cloud interface.
And that's the same with Google, the Microsoft and others.
So the tech sector is massive. And let's focus why it's
interesting for engineering. Well, a lot of and, and by the
way, before I do that, I should say that is I would say that's
that's called the tech sector. But I think it's probably worth
also linking that particularly because we're talking about
engineering now with the software market as well.
Because I think there is a bit of a blurred line in the sense
of the Siemens, I think I suppose you'd call it Siemens
Digital Industries, because Siemens is obviously a very big
company. The ANSYS, the Cadence, the
Dassault, you know, Autodesk Synopsis, I'm probably
forgetting some of the other companies now Hexagon that
develop software. And these are very large
organisations, you know, multibillion dollar companies
that that sort of develop this software.
And so I would sort of tie them in actually in the sense of, of
what they're doing, particularly in terms of, of, of job roles.
So if you look at, let's say, the tech sector, what sort of
job roles are there and what could you be doing there?
Well, as I said, there are a very large number of SDS,
software development engineers, people who are expected to, you
know, write code for a whole range of different things.
And in some ways they typically start off being generalists.
So a fungible sort of asset that is just great at coding and
programming. And so those are quite often
entry level positions that you come in.
And at the beginning you may be literally just working on any
piece of, you know, databases, web applications, high
performance computing, machine learning, you know, just really
anything. And you may be just given a
small sort of task to do. But in terms of career
progression, you know, you will find that you'd become then much
more potentially specific to a certain area and you would take
more responsibility where you may end up either managing a
team of sort of software development engineers, which is
often referred to as SDM software development manager, or
you may stay what actually is a sort of individual contributor.
And I should, I should explain this.
And I realise I'm probably rambling on a little bit in this
podcast episode. So apologies about that.
I suppose I'm trying to make it as if we were just having a
conversation in a in a pub, just without the alcohol.
Typically in the tech sector, I would argue one of the benefits
is that there are typically 2 paths, the management path and
the IC path. Individual contributor and I
actually quite like that because I think some people are
different. I personally, I've never been a
manager and I don't particularly have a great desire to be a
manager. And sometimes in other companies
that can actually be a bit of a ceiling to your career if you
don't want to, you know, manage people, that might be it.
You could never progress because the only way to progress is to
be a manager and a director and a senior director.
And you know, as you go up where actually in a lot of tech
companies, what's great is they have a track pretty much all the
way to the top for individual contributors.
And to go back to the discussion I was just having about SD ES,
that's where there are this notion of, you know, a principal
engineer or distinguished engineer or senior principal
engineer or a fellow or whatever the naming convention is in that
particular company. And these are individual
contributors. That can actually, I said be
very senior, but have no management.
And that is something actually, I think quite important to know
because some people believe that the only way to progress is
essentially to become a manager, which for some people they want
to do and they're good at doing, but it's important to know that
you don't have to to do that. So the, the Ste. root is a very
interesting root if you are particularly strong on the code
in the programming side. Now I typically find that people
are are one or the other. They're either very good at
programming and enjoy it, but like, you know, foreign
languages, I guess, or they really don't like it or they're
not very good at it. And so the Ste. root is
definitely more you like programming, you're good at
programming. But there is also an interesting
site that then has a parallel to sort of project management in
terms of engineering. That actually a key role is
software development managers who have to, you know, organize
sprints and put things in in dashboards to track progression
of, you know, which bit of code has been developed here and how
does it meet this target? And then it has to go through a
security review and app SEC and a legal review, and then it has
to be checked by somebody else. And this is whole sort of
management that happens in these big tech companies.
So you do find that actually people move over from sort of
traditional engineering into this software sometimes as
software development managers. So if you, let's say, are
someone who work at a traditional engineering company
and you've been leading a group of engineers to develop
something, you may actually find there is a career option in a
tech company leading a team of software development engineers,
particularly if it's related to something in the engineering
space, which we'll get on to a minute is, is quite often
increasingly happening. And of course, vice versa.
You know, if you're sort of STM in a tech company, you may find
there could be interesting roles in an engineering company
because of the of, of the overlap.
So that's that's what I would call the engineering teams.
And this is important distinction actually that maybe
it's not so well known, at least in my experience, all these tech
companies and I think it's true also with the software companies
typically have two or three broad vertical areas, which is
the engineering or product side of the business.
I mean, this is true for pretty much all the tech companies
where your responsibility is to develop the products and
engineer the code. So there's a lot of engineers or
you are in quote UN quote, the sales bit of the organization
where essentially your job is to sell the stuff that the
engineers make. It's a very, you know, crude
distinction because of course there is a lot of overlap and
there's a lot of information exchange between the two.
And then sometimes under sales is is marketing, but sometimes
it's a separate sort of vertical.
And then quite often these companies sometimes have a sort
of third or fourth leg, which is their consulting or professional
services, which is essentially when you have a product, you try
and sell it, but the customer says I need you to help me to
implement it or maybe even improve it.
And those are very large tech companies quite often have a, a
special arm that is you quite often would pay the company to
have people come into your company to help you to do it.
Sometimes hands on keyboard help.
So that that is actually, and I think it's important to know
this because sometimes when you look at job roles online, it's
not immediately obvious what side of the business it's on.
And that can have an influence in terms of what, what job you
would, you know, be doing. So that's the engineering.
Now another role is product management.
That is something that is very common in the software and tech
sectors. And your job is to manage the
direction and the definition of the product.
Now that product could be a piece of CFD software.
If it's a very big piece of CFD software, it could be a sub
component of that piece of CFD software.
So you are the product manager for the meshing team or the
meshing bit of the product or you are the product manager for
a particular cloud computing service.
So you're the product manager for Amazon S3 or for Google, you
know, blah, blah, blah, whatever the name of the service is that
you don't have to come from an engineering background.
And quite often, actually, people more come from a, doing
an MBA, let's say. But quite often, depending on
the company, while they do value having a technical or
engineering background. And then your job is to, as I
said, come up with the product definition.
And it's slightly different than the engineering and it does
depend on the company, but normally the product manager is
the one who will think about the needs of the end user.
The customer will sort of work with the sales team to get that,
you know, definition of what the product is or to help liaise,
you know, with them to define what the product should be and
then work with the engineering team to actually deliver it.
And of course, this is a team effort.
So typically that project manner will be, you know, very much
managing and tracking progress. You know, this needs to happen,
this needs to happen, this needs to happen at this timeline
timeline. They need to be technical enough
to push back and to understand, you know, if a customer says I
need this feature X or, you know, to even understand what it
is and to be able to understand the language of the engineering
team, you know, to understand what what needs to be done and,
and sort of understand timelines, etcetera.
They're often they're responsible commercially for the
revenue of it. So thinking, you know what,
what, how much should we charge for it?
How much money are we making on this thing?
You know, clearly the software, there's either a license or or
some sort of fee for it. And so that is a whole job
family of its own. And you know, I would estimate
there are 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of, you
know, product management jobs and very transferable between
companies. Many people move between
companies because it is a skill to sort of manage a product and
that again, very relevant for engineers to, to, to do because
quite often they want a quite technical product manager.
In fact, sometimes that's even part of the title, you know,
it's sort of technical project management.
So that's something if you look for as sort of job adverts,
you'd see it as like PMT or PM. And that's like I said, if you
enjoy some managing and particularly like some people
come from like an MBA background or want to do an MBA, that's
quite often for them. And the career progression of
that is often then, you know, you manage a team of product
managers, you become a director, you become AVP or something like
that. That's something that I don't
think is as well known, but it's definitely a career route for,
for for some people. As I said, those would be
typically the main sort of engineering functions.
You would then find, let's go more into the sales part of the
business. You would find a job family
that's quite commonly referred to as a solution architect,
quite a sort of tech sector type job title, but you know, very,
very common and something that I find not all engineers know
about. And so a solution architect,
depends which company you work for, of course, is typically
somebody who works to architect. It's going to be silly to say
this because I'm essentially to say the job title in reverse,
but architect the solution. What does that really mean is
let's say you custom A, who wants to use a software product?
B Well, first of all, maybe there's not just one software
product, maybe there's many software products and the
customer doesn't really know which one they should use.
And then maybe they all need to connect together.
And this is certainly true for sort of cloud services and, and
the solution architect is someone who understands how to
implement that solution, to guide them which solution they
should pick, how to maybe link it into their environment.
So I can certainly speak from let's say CFD or high
performance computing background solution architect would be
somebody who deeply understands HPC and CFD and would be able to
say right customer AI think that first of all, let me explain
what this product is. So you have to be quite
technical and I think you should do it in this way.
You know, you should use this service and I think if you
connect it with this service, you'll be able to then do this.
And you know, this is how we could do your existing systems
and, and we'll work with you to sort of architect a diagram, you
know, of how you would link all this stuff together.
Maybe then there would be somebody who would help to maybe
benchmark it, particularly from a software point of view, be
like, OK, this is how it would perform and they would work to,
you know, get that customer to to then buy it.
And that's why sometimes it's called pre sales, although
sometimes that can be a bit of a stigma and some people don't
like to be called it pre sales. But traditionally it's sort of
is that way that it's, it's quite often engagement before
they buy that piece of software. And some companies explicitly
call it pre sales and they even call it a pre sales engineer.
I think that's a bit more true in the software market, let's
say the answer Siemens, etcetera.
But in the tech sector, quite often it's called a sort of
solution architect. And there are different types.
And this is where we could go into so many rabbit holes of
specialist solution architect, the more generalist solution
architect. But it's important because you
will sometimes see these these jobs advertised and increase
them. They are looking for engineers
and a lot of engineers just don't know what the job is.
So that's why I mention it. Usually the solution architect
is working also with some sort of business development person
who is there again, in a sales function to hopefully try and
sell that product. But more than just sell, be an
advisor to, to the customer to say, look, I, you know, working
closely with that solution architect who is perhaps a
little bit more technical, but the business development is
often still a technical role. And many of the people I know
who do business development have come from very technical
background. They have a degree that even the
PhD, they've worked as an engineer, but they just enjoy
the more commercial side, sort of quasi sales.
So typically they work together and again, many opportunities,
often a more pure sales role is something like an account
manager. And that is where there's a lot
of crossover to completely non engineering roles.
You know, working at any sort of company where you're managing an
account you're selling. I mean that is just such a broad
role. So those are sort of what I
would call the sales type of positions.
Now I did mention that quite a lot of companies have these more
consulting or professional services side of the business
and these are usually very technical people because their
job is to go in and practically help a customer.
Hands on keyboard is using the phrase.
So whilst the solution architect may give the advice, they're not
usually allowed to actually touch a customer's account or,
or, or work on the thing for legal reasons and, and
financially sort of wouldn't really work out.
So often there is a, a branch where they need technical people
go in and actually help a customer to use that piece of
software, whether it's a sort of web-based thing, let's say cloud
or whether it's a engineering piece of software like CFD or
fluids. And they will go in and help
that customer to use and implement.
And sometimes they don't charge for it.
Quite often it is a business model to charge for it and there
are lots of jobs needing very technical engineering people to
do that. And that's again another a job
option. And this is that link to I
mentioned all those consulting companies and sometimes they're
also called system integrators. And those are companies that
will go in and actually help a very large organization
typically to implement some big change or big use of software.
And so sometimes rather than using, let's say, a tech
companies, consulting engineers, they will go and use one of
these big sort of consulting companies, whether it's, you
know, Accenture or it could be Arab or it could be Boston
Consulting, I guess technically and all these sort of companies
that operate in that sphere to go and practically implement and
go in. Often they also do sort of
strategy work, but quite often it is hands on keyboard help.
And again, that is another route.
They often have dedicated engineering divisions like an
aerospace division, defence division, etcetera.
Now the final piece is maybe support.
So in software companies there is often not just a pre sales
but essentially a post sales, which is also referred to as
typically a support. And those are also typically
very engineering focused and they need to help customers who
have bought the software and need help.
Some people transition between pre sales, post sales and sort
of development role within the engineering side of the
business. And again, there are many jobs,
let's say Siemens or an Ansys or Cadence, you know, hundreds of
jobs for people with engineering degrees and backgrounds to
support customers. And it's sometimes called
Technical Support to go and help them to use and, and, and
develop the software. And what's the further layer to
this is that there's often teams specifically to cover, let's say
EMEA to cover America to be a worldwide role.
So how they do I just so many opportunities and increasingly
they're Criss crossing with the traditional engineering
companies. Sometimes the traditional
engineering companies are sort of losing staff to go to those
or it could be that the traditional engineers are
creating their own little teams to sort of mirror a little bit
what happens. But I think particularly the
tech sector ones is stuff that a lot of people don't know about
and I think increasingly that's going to be the case.
OK, final thing, I know I've definitely been rambling on a
lot. So if you have specific
questions, maybe put it in the comments if you're watching on
YouTube is the AI side of the piece.
There are, and in some ways this is a bit of an overlap with what
I'm talking, but it's it's really to re confirm the point
because AI is becoming so important for for the end
engineering companies, but also for the software companies to
develop AI enhanced or focused products.
There's a whole new set of jobs specifically looking at AI.
And for me personally, I think one of the biggest interesting
areas is either that just means there's just more need for the
software development engineers to program that sort of stuff.
But I would point out, and it is a little bit more in this
industry at the moment, but it's going to grow, Is there's a lot
of need for people with engineering, physics, maths for
AI and that's sometimes called AI for science.
And if you've listened to this podcast before, you'll see I've
had quite a few guests talk about this AI for science.
But there are more than 10 startups and Isvs now who are
focused on using AI for engineering and sciences.
And so they are looking for graduates and early and mid and
late stage career people with that background.
I would highly advise people that that is a great area to
look to. First of all, it is, oh, you
know, just an emerging area that is very exciting and it is
something that not many people have the skills on.
So it's quite a valuable resource.
And so if you're, if you have those skills, you know, that's
good for your career. But it's really, but it's
bringing again this, I guess ARC that I'm talking about of
software and traditional engineering together.
Engineering companies are developing their own AI teams,
software companies are developing their own AI
products. So it's a great area to be in
and really confirms this sort of Arc of there is more than just
traditional engineering, but more so in terms of roles and
and jobs. And I think you'll find that
hopefully understanding this ecosystem of jobs and companies
will help you to make a more rounded decision of not only
where you want to go, but just in general what's happening in
the world. Now, as I said, this is just a
personal opinion. I'm probably missing out whole
sweeps of companies and, and jobs and sectors and, and, and
probably I, you know, I'll try and maybe do a few more.
I didn't really touch much more on sort of career progression.
I think we took talk about salaries on purpose because it's
such a difficult topic to get into with different countries.
And yeah, but I, I wanted to just put this out because
sometimes I've had these sort of conversations with people who
ask a little bit for career advice and, and again, just
thinking what, what, what would I wish that I'd known before?
So I'm happy to deep dive in particular topic areas like a
particular tech sector, type of job or, or, or type of position.
But yeah, maybe let me know if this is on, if you're watching
on YouTube, maybe you could put some comments if you found this
useful or if there's other stuff that you would like.
But yeah, hope you enjoyed this and we have a few more
interesting episodes coming this this season on some what I think
are quite exciting topics. But in the meantime, hope you
enjoy this episode and don't forget to like and subscribe on
YouTube or follow this if you're on Spotify, Apple, and if you
can give a rating that helps. On the topic of tech companies,
there's a lot of algorithms that work and unfortunately nobody
gets to see stuff unless there is some user interaction.
So if you just listen to this alone, that's great.
But unfortunately it it makes it difficult for other people to
find it where if you literally just press the like button, it
sort of obviously changes its position in the rankings and and
helps obviously me, but it helps to get greater exposure, which
of course you don't have to do it, but if you did, I'd much
appreciate it. OK, I'll stop rambling now.
Thanks very much.