There and back again: taking a break from work for the modern engineer

Hello internet,

I assume, like me, many of you are technical types that work full time jobs slamming out code, making CAD models, and doing science. Rad. This is complicated, hard work, that can fry your brain, make life at home tough, turn your body to mush, and end up all being for naught, as the company dies, goes in a different direction, or is no longer a good fit for you. Many people frame who they are by the work they do, and the first thing they use to describe themselves in a social setting is their job.

My perspective on career got really screwed up when my first job out of school was SpaceX, as most people tend see their career as a progression towards an unattainable pinnacle “best job” and I got that out of the way day one. ( It was pretty fun to be honest). Ever since, finding meaning and purpose in life has been easier for me. I know just how extreme the mission can be, and I can self identify where I want to go, and what things I want to do, and know they’re within reason.

The last year(ish) of my life has been the in between that most experience but few embrace: unemployment. It sounds scary, can be challenging financially, and frequently leads to depression, but I tried my best to make it a purposeful and positive, and in my view it was one of the most successful years of my life. Turns out, you don’t need the purse strings of a billionaire to have a good time.

Why I quit (and you should too!) (maybe)

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Quitting a job is in some ways like severing a relationship. The smaller the company or working group, the more of a human interaction it becomes. There are a myriad of right and wrong reasons to leave a job:

• interpersonal conflict
• low pay
• poor management
• abusive practices
• unsafe working conditions
• technical obsolescence
• corporate financial stability
• relocation
• medical issues
• life events
• you don’t like the view from your desk

the list goes on. I’m always torn when I leave a place because generally I like to form strong bonds with my team and coworkers, and I’ve put a ton of my heart and soul into the work and building the company.

The main reason I usually go through with leaving is: I’ve spent a long time evaluating whether or not the situation is equitable to me, on a personal, financial, and professional level, and decided that it’s no longer the case. Normally it’s death by a thousand cuts, and not one big red flag that pushes me to leave somewhere, and I generally have more options than most when picking the next adventure.

In this specific case I was leaving Arrivo, a follow on to the Hyperloop project that was aimed at intra-city travel at high speeds.

I was leading a small engineering team on the infrastructure part of the problem, and focused on developing robotic deployment methods for pre-fabbed segments. The technical work was very cool, and I had already made great progress in both trades and building a prototyping machine shop for investor tech demos.

I was learning a lot, but I didn’t have much in the way of autonomy, as leadership was churning on decision making, and we also were having financial issues. The CEO (Brogan) made a hard left dumping all resources into Maglev tech (which trades and research had shown was not going to pan out), at which point I decided to move on and take some time for myself. The company died a few months later.

What I did next

At this point most people would be freaking out. No job? Living in LA, where the rents are high and the work ethic is higher? How do I get by! So I came up with a mission and made a plan- The mission was: I now work for a company of one (me) and I’m trying to build that company into a place where I’d love working.

Exploring yourself

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So the first thing I did was reflect on the last few years of employment, what I liked and didn’t. I came to a few conclusions:

• I highly value a sense of autonomy, mastery, and contributing to a larger goal
• I enjoy projects that take advantage of my technical skills
• I need to work on my health (weight and mental)
• I like working with badass people, who are the best at what they do.
• I want to shape the culture of the place I work.
• I need to get better at communicating and navigating political environments

Improving yourself

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So next came the hard part: Doing something about it. I took a bunch of steps and tried a bunch of things here, lots of experimenting, no wrong answers. You owe it to yourself to try something different in your life. It goes pretty fast after all. I’d saved some money over the course of my career so far, so I chose to spend some of it to improve myself.

Home Lab Office

I found that working at my desk in my room was difficult, as I tend to treat my room as a relaxing place after work, and I’d always goof off on the internet if I jumped on my computer in there. So I took a note from high school psychology and relocated my desk to the other side of my house, in a separate room from by bed.

This 40ft commute made working at home entirely viable rather than an unproductive slog. It also got me thinking about the kinds of tools I’d normally have available at work, and how I could get a similar setup inexpensively at home. This way even if I took another job, I’d have leveled up in terms of the work I could accomplish on my own. Some things I added:

• 2 additional external monitors
• Das Keyboard
• Rigol DS1054 oscilloscope
• DC Variable power supply
• Solder fume extractor
• Prusa MK3 3d Printer + MMU
• Toolboxes (splurged a bit here)
• Workbench and Lights
• Video & Audio setup for basic media production
• Website (this one) to communicate through a channel other than social media

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Exercise & Schedule

All this startup-ing over the past 8 years had lead to significant deterioration of both my physical and mental state. I hadn’t walked more than a mile in years. I was over 350 pounds at one point. My blood pressure was elevated. I was frequently depressed, and offset this by constantly partying with friends. I figured two things would help: Losing weight and getting into a reasonable schedule.

To lose weight, I started counting the calories in everything I ate. Energy in – energy out was my mantra. After a few months I lost 20 pounds, and now I’m down 70 total. I have off days where I eat too much, but in general understanding caloric content and homeostasis burn has helped tremendously in knowing if I’m on the right track eating wise.

I realized that exercise wouldn’t much contribute to weight loss, but that it was important for general health and mental state, so I started hiking 3-5 miles a day. I found the most beautiful park in LA just across the street from my house with sweeping views of downtown. I hadn’t noticed it in the 3 years I’d lived there. To make up for that, I walked through this park almost every day for the next 6 months. Year end I’ve hiked over 1000 miles in 2018. I feel much better and my blood pressure has dropped somewhat.

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Contracting

To explore a different way of working, I took a contract to work on a high profile (secretive) project. I drew up a contract with a lawyer friend and was signed on. It was short term and should be fun in any case. We were building a giant robot for a certain festival.

It was interesting to work with artists, but the lead patron died suddenly and sent the project into disarray just a couple months in, at which point funding dried up and we all parted ways.

If I were to approach contracting again, I’d probably do it more as a side project than as a full time thing. Communications were difficult and sparse, and legal contracts added lots of friction to an otherwise approachable problem. I also tend to prefer projects lead by people with more technical know-how, as it can be very difficult to direct artists who have grand ideas and little understanding of first principles.

Bootstrapping – Swarf

Having joined many startups over the past 8 years, I decided why not start my own? I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit about the work I’ve been doing. Seeing a problem in industry or the world at large and trying to tackle it by methodically breaking it down and taking small bites until the whale is consumed has always been a pastime. I’ve always had a keen interest in manufacturing technology and pursued a business model for a modern machine shop, something well within my wheelhouse. I made a spreadsheet to calculate margins, starting looking at equipment and space, got ready to register a business, and set up a quick website. I started building the brand by teaching free classes at crashspace under the company name. I was excited to be on a new adventure! and around then is when I came to a few realizations

• I’m an engineer, not an expert machinist, machine shop is going to get boring
• The market price for machines is high, and aerospace is supposedly about to trend down
• Margins are going to be razor thin or negative for years
• I don’t have enough capital to start this business

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Bootstraping attempt 2 – now with friends

So I decided to mothball Swarf. I still love the name, and want to use it to build a robotics company one day, but for now, it’s on ice. At this point I was reached out to by a bunch of former colleagues from SpaceX / Hyperloop. They were all either bored with their current roles or looking to start something, so we met up and ideated on a few startup concepts to solve our generational problem: too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We’re engineers and wanted to play to our strengths, so focused on engineering centric companies that would allow us to leverage our networks and build massive industry disrupting world changing systems with venture capital investment. I think a couple of the concepts were pretty novel and would have major impact, but for one reason or another, we didn’t get momentum on anything and I decided rather than playing phone tag I should hold off on startup conception for a bit.

Conferences

To broaden my horizons and meet new people, I attended a few conferences with my spare time

• Defcon – Largest hacker convention, held annually in Las Vegas (link to blog post)
• Shellcon- A small hacker convention in Long Beach
• Hackaday Supercon – A hardware hacker convention in Pasedena

I found lots of new friends at the various conferences and also gained some new insights into tangential industries I’d only experienced through conversation with friends in the past.

I find the hacker community to be an excellent, down to earth, personable and friendly group that wants to generally help each other out and grow together as a big family of sorts. It’s pretty amazing to see the stark difference between more professional conferences like ASME or AIAA that trend towards academic or industry focus, and a more informal conference like Defcon. Read more about it in my really long blog post

Social Gatherings

Company Party   – Had a bunch of friends over to celebrate each other’s company, with a corperate theme. It happened to coincide with the release date of the boring co flamethrowers. Lots of fun

Arrivoderchi Time – I had a celebration of my time in LA before I left for San Francisco. We had Bahn Mi’s from the most delicious spot in LA and played games. It was a good time.

Down the Rabbit Hole – My first cohosted party with Matt, Adelle and Steven, Alice in wonderland themed with cocktails and a rad UV Tunnel. Served as a housewarming for our new apartment

Exploration 

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The thing this break from work afforded me the most, and what probably kept me the happiest was the chance to explore interests and focus on projects and adventures I’d had to put aside in the past for work.

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Making rad stuff! – With all the free time I got to make a bunch of rad hardware. I made a few necklaces on my friend Liana’s 1.5kw laser (calipers and ninjapenguin dino logo), 3d printed a bunch of stuff on my new printer, and built a trailer for burning man with my friend Casey.

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Burning Man – I attended the annual festival for my 7th year, and was co-mayor of Gigsville. It was an interesting year with it’s ups and downs, but I got to contribute to some great art projects with my now roommates Matt and Adelle, and made friends with Sophi and many others.

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JPL – My friend and resident astrophysicist Casey Handmer gave me an a colleague a tour of the world famous JPL campus. I even got to see a curiosity engineering model up close and personal.

Trip to Japan – I planned a trip to Japan that got cut unfortunately by the move to SF. But I’ll do it, one of these days!

Exploratory Trip to SF I made a quick trip to the bay area to check out a startup and ended up finding a rad room to crash in.

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Desert Camping Trips – I went on a couple camping trips in the desert with Gigsville folks. One to blow stuff up, and another in late fall. At the second one I got to test out the new trailer in it’s post burning man config and it made camping way more awesome and easier.

Oberth Arm – I designed a polar plotting scara architecture robot arm and started coding an Odrive to control it. I’m still working on the prototype as a side project, check out the project page over on Hackaday.io I’ve built a test stand for the motors and gotten everything working (check out this video :D)

Change of scenery

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Decision to Move

I had a bit of an artificial crisis on my hands as my roommate of many years decided to purchase a house, and I needed to find a new spot (or roommates). I had an offer from friends in San Francisco to move in with them, and thought, hell, why not. This is a big advantage of not being tied to an employer.

Move to SF

I packed up my stuff in a storage unit, loaded my truck, and moved myself to SF mid October. It was around this point I started advertising in my friend network that I was looking for work again, as I figured it’d be prudent to have income living in one of the most expensive cities in the US.

Explore Local Job Market

About a month after I moved up I started getting a ton of interest from various startups, VC firms, big companies, and the like in the SF area. I had met a couple CEOs through some friends who were well connected in the area and they got the word out that I was looking. I came upon a really interesting hardware accelerator in an old pipe organ factory called Otherlab. They had a nice machine shop setup downstairs and were walking distance from my apartment. Otherlab also was a dog friendly office. This piqued my interest, as a big goal in moving to SF was to get a pupper.

I’ve been to the desert. There was just a lot of Bojack Horseman

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Director of Engineering – So I landed at a small company working on heat exchanger tech called Treau (treau.cool). It’s a real tiny, early days startup, trying to have a positive impact on refrigeration energy use across industry and consumer markets. The challenge is exciting as it’s multidisciplinary (Mechanical, Electrical, Fluids, Thermo, Software, Manufacturing, etc.) and it’s slightly left field of my prior experience in engineering. Right now we’ll be cranking out prototypes, but I’m excited to help steer the technical growth of the company as it evolves into (hopefully) a juggernaut.

For now I’m excited to start on this new adventure, but I don’t regret a minute of the time spent in-between (jobs). If you ever get a chance, and have enough money saved, consider taking a deliberate break between this venture and your next. Chances are, if you’ve proven yourself in your industry, and you take the time to do some meaningful life growth, finding the next job won’t be an issue. You’ll be glad you took the time for yourself.