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 and Formula One to some of the world's top academics to
understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning and
supercomputing are bringing in a new era of 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 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'm living in the UK. I'm going to have a sort of UK
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 a degree. I appreciate that there are
routes 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 related to engineering,
Although to be honest, engineering is a very broad
field 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 tens 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 SMEs, 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, again, they're, 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 one to five
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 say 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 a
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 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 I suppose 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 over 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 Airbus 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 Capgemini, 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 Arup as well in
that they have specialist teams and 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-unquote, a traditional
engineering company and will instead go to one of these
consulting companies because there is a 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 consulting companies that quite often, let's say they're
based in London, again, sorry, bit of UK-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
they're 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, Airbus may or
Boeing may sort of appear to be the aircraft manufacturer, but
in fact there are hundreds or thousands of companies that
develop sub components for them.
And and actually the large companies outsource quite a lot
to it. So it's 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, et cetera, 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 Dassault 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 BAE Systems or
whatever that was before it was BAE 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- unquote, 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 aerodynamicist, principal
aerodynamicist, et cetera. 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-type 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 its 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 move you between projects.
Certainly that's the case that some of these large like the
Rolls-Royce, Airbus and 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
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
consulting 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
SDEs. 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 thousands, tens of
thousands of SDEs 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—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 some ways retrained to go
into this. So even if you 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, this is important: AI.
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 may be 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 maybe has only more recently become a bit more
known. And still, though, I don't think
it is that well 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, OpenAI, 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 FAANG, 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 Seven?
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. Ansys, the Cadence, the
Dassault, you know, Autodesk Synopsys, 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 SDEs,
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 SDEs, 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 SDE route is a very
interesting route 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 SDE route is
definitely more you like programming, you're good at
programming. But there is also an interesting
side 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 AppSec 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 works 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 an
SDM 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 an 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-unquote, 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 subcomponent 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 come more from 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
manager 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 tens 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 PM-T or PM.
And that's like I said, if you enjoy also 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 a VP 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 just saying the job title in
reverse, but architect the solution.
What does that really mean is let's say you have customer 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 A, I
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 Ansys, 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 jobs
advertised, and increasingly 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, even a 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 usually 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 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 company's 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
Arup 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 there are 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 about, 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 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 didn't really 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 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.