Career changes

(suspense music) - For my career path, I didn't start out as a senior Android developer. I started out as a Junior embedded systems engineer. And I was working in the embedded systems field for many, many years. After a while, it got a little bit routine for me. And that's right around the same time that I started thinking about my career path. In terms of career path, I also started thinking about what I'm really interested in. So there was some side projects at the time, where a friend approached me to work on Android. And after that that's what got me interested in Android. I started solving problems. And then I was taking what I learned in the embedded systems as well, and seeing how I could apply the same techniques and things that I learned in embedded systems, seeing how I could apply that in Android, and just developing a passion of it. And it was being able to solve these problems that helped develop my passion. And as I became more and more passionate about it, it became easier. It was no longer about work. It was fun. So I kind of found my passion in Android development. - We have learned to code, hour of code, lots of coding classes going on, which at least give people the basis of what all this is about. It may give them everything that it's about. It's certainly giving people a paintbrush, but not necessarily giving them an art course. But it's giving them an appreciation of the process that's going on inside of it. - Well, one of the challenges is not working in the tech industry. I've worked at a lot of different places, but when there's not a lot of technical people working there, there's not really the same opportunities for advancement. And I worked at non-profits for a lot of years, where usually my immediate supervisor would be the IT manager, IT director, something like that, which isn't a position I can aspire to because I'm not going to learn how to fix printers and do networking. That's just a totally different skillset. So if you want to move up, your only choice is really to go work somewhere else. That's how you move up, and get new responsibilities, and get larger pay. So for people that work in technical jobs, they tend not to work at the same place for a very long time. So it's kind of frustrating that to move forward you have to spend all this energy looking for a new job every few years. And especially, as you get older, you want more stability, but it's harder to find that when you do this type of work. - I mean, how do you let go of a specific technology, and how do you grow with the industry for those new technologies, is almost the same question. Because if you are always curious, if you always push yourself to, or challenge yourself to learn those new technologies, it's going to be easy to let go of the old technologies that you need to let go of. I mean, for example, when I started learning X Code, and started learning Objective C, and then Swift, and then all that, to me it was easy to let go of JavaScript for a little bit because I wanted to build new applications for mobile. I want to follow the industry. I was motivated to do it.