by Doug Coulter » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:42 pm
I skipped out of high school due to amazing SAT scores to start college as a HS sophomore, then skipped out of college as I was offered a 6 fig job - in '71. I don't even have a diploma of any kind! If you can do the stuff, the paper doesn't mean crap to a real businessman, nor does your color or sex in nearly all cases I've witnessed. My old company, C-Lab, got our first big customer based on the fact that yes, we'd done the first truly viable digital nonlinear audio editing system from the ground up (and it would do 38 CD quality channels on a 486 - with efx, and in real time full duplex)...
Came about in a weird way. I designed and built all this hardware and software while unemployed for something to do - it'd been a long time dream and it was getting close to possible at a time the best thing on the market was an 8 bit half-duplex system from creative labs. (and CD burners were scsi only and cost over $2k) I happened to be able to live without any real income, so I designed the board (Ti DSP, far more powerful than a 486), the windows drivers, the application, and the DSP software to run in the TI machine. Ti got to know me because of the questions I asked about some pretty serious detail (and even eventually used my input on the tms320-c30 series), and when asked by the guy who was to become our main customer who knew this stuff, told them about me.
It was a great interview. I just brought in the system and demo'd it. They (a big telecom/paging/pbx manuf) were appropriately amazed that I could do what I could do - make an entire 3 min song in about the time it took to play each instrument once through, and easily correct any errors -
They asked me who did the drivers. Answer, I did. Then asked who wrote the app, well, I did. Then who designed the hardware, well, same answer. How long did it take? Something under 6 months. The next question was how much money I wanted.
And that was that - roughly 10 million gross in 3 years and I had to frantically find other talented guys to hire to handle it all.
But you must understand, I was born at the lucky end of the gene pool, and by then had been working on engineering since the dual triode was the hot new thing. I was an overnight success after only a few decades of practice...(raised by an engineer, so I got to start real early).
No one asked me for paper, ever. That's not how you get the good jobs. You know someone, or someone knows you. You completely bypass HR, which always wants paper certs that say you have 6 years of experience in something that has only existed for 4-5....jerks/idiots/CYA types. You meet another engineer, by chance or something, and he and his boss decide you're going to be on the team, and you shine on the HR BS after that. No good job has ever come to me via resume submission. Never.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.