This is part 2 in my Career series.   This series is an honest look back at three decades: the mistakes made, the math that didn’t add up, and the pivotal inflection points that shaped the road to where I am today.  Part 1 can be found here The Greatest Teacher, failure is – Planes, Math, and the Red Light District

This post comes with a warning: it is longer than my typical updates and does not show me in the best light.  These are the hard lessons I learned as I grew in my career and hopefully in life

MegaCorp #1: The Power of a Single Line

My first job, post Denmark,  was at a Fortune 500 computer company. This was the early nineties, a time when “Made in North America” still applied to high-volume electronics. We did in-house manufacturing at what I’ll call MegaCorp #1. The company was a powerhouse, producing motherboards, high-end server boards, and Memory for computers (SIMMs). If you have ever looked at a green circuit board from the guts of a computer, that was what I was building.

I actually started there on a 16-month internship during university. I was a “Process Engineer”—essentially the person responsible for figuring out the mechanical and chemical puzzles of how to actually build this stuff at scale. I returned as a full-time regular engineer after graduation.

My very first lesson didn’t happen on the assembly line; it happened during the application process of my internship. On my first day, my new boss sat me down and told me that I had been pulled out of a stack of hundreds, if not thousands, of applications from students across the country.

For these co-op jobs, there were no formal interviews. The company simply reviewed the submitted resumes and made their picks. As students, we all looked the same on paper: same degrees, same lack of experience, same GPA ranges. But my boss told me there was one specific line on my resume that made him stop flipping pages.

The line read: “Experience cutting and planting C4 plastic explosives.”

During a summer in high school, I had taken a job that any able-bodied kid could get, working for a local oil and gas seismographic company. Their job was to map underground geography by setting off charges and measuring the shockwaves. C4 is essentially silly putty—totally safe to handle—and my job was to cut it into the right-sized chunks to be dropped down the boreholes with the blasting cap.

To a hiring manager in a sea of boring resumes, that line screamed “interesting.”

Life Lesson #4: Stand out from the crowd somehow. In a competitive market, being “qualified” is the bare minimum. You need a hook. I would even argue that, within the bounds of reason, it doesn’t even have to be 100% “truthful” if you can spin the experience effectively, use your creative license.

The “Think Like Solder” Philosophy

Once I settled into the company, I quickly realized there was a hierarchy of roles. There were the “sexy” jobs—high-profile R&D or new product launches where people got noticed and promoted—and then there were the “cleanup” jobs. Cleanup was the unglamorous, high-pressure work of fixing broken processes. By a roll of the dice, I got “Cleanup in Aisle 3.”

I turned out to be a decent engineer. In hindsight, that first year was likely the most “pure” engineering I’ve ever done. I was obsessed with solving the problems or “puzzles” that other people were too distracted to think through to the end. I had a knack for figuring out exactly why a specific motherboard was coming off the line with defects.

My mantra at the time was “Think Like Solder.” To the uninitiated, that sounds ridiculous. But to me, it was everything. It meant understanding the interplay of four three things:

1. Thermodynamics: How much heat is being applied to the joint?
2. Corrosion/Chemistry: How much oxide is on the surface preventing a bond?
3. Fluid Dynamics: Where would the molten metal flow if given the path of least resistance?
4. Death Star Blueprints (ok maybe just three things)

This was as geeky as I ever got. I spent my days analyzing data and staring at  circuit boards under microscopes.

For a while, I loved it. But I had a massive, looming flaw: I was a “data fundamentalist.” I believed that because I had the stats and the physics on my side, I was always right. I believed that facts and data didn’t lie, and therefore, all corporate decisions should be 100% based on them.

Combine that rigid belief system with a young man’s opinionated nature and a total inability to keep my mouth shut, and you have a recipe for a political disaster.

Foot in Mouth #1: The Bid Review

Looking back, if I had three feet, all of them would have ended up in my mouth at different times during that first year.

The first incident involved the Industrial Engineering (IE) group. The IE team was responsible for “time studies”—measuring exactly how many seconds it took a human or a machine to perform a task. These numbers were vital; they were used to bid on new customer contracts and served as the baseline for manufacturing efficiency.

I was the Process Engineer for a few custom manufacturing steps that were being included in a major new bid. I knew my numbers. I had built the process from scratch. I had timed it myself.

One afternoon, I was standing in my manager’s office along with her manager for a formal bid review. My manager, who oversaw the entire Process Engineering group (among several other departments), was presenting the final numbers for the bid.

As she spoke, I realized the numbers on the slide weren’t mine. They had been “optimized”—which is corporate-speak for “reduced to make the bid look more attractive.”

As any “good” (read: arrogant) engineer would do, I spoke up immediately. In front of her boss, I told her the numbers were wrong. I went further: I said I suspected the Industrial Engineering team had changed the numbers and that the new data was “crap.” I told them they were just trying to hit a target by playing with the math. I hammered my point home: “I know my numbers.”

The room went cold. As my manager’s face turned several distinct shades of red, a realization slowly dawned on me. One of the other departments she managed—the one I had just called incompetent and accused of fabricating data—was Industrial Engineering.

I had just called my boss a liar and a failure in front of the person who decided her salary.

Career Lesson #5: Know your audience before speaking up. Being right is not the same thing as being effective. If you have to correct a superior, do it in a way that allows them to save face, not in a way that puts their head on a platter.

Shortly after that meeting, I found myself being “transferred” to a new department.

Foot in Mouth #2: The Quota and the “Box Boy”

In my second department, I was given a choice of roles. All of them were, in my opinion, a step down from what I had been doing. I eventually ended up being “asked” (read: told) to work under a different engineering manager to design packaging.

“Box Boy.”

In my mind, this was the worst engineering job in the entire company. It was engineering purgatory, hidden in a back corner of the building where nobody would see you. To make matters worse, I had zero respect for this new manager. In my youthful arrogance, I judged her as a poor engineer based upon a brief encounter before.

This was 1993, and the corporate world was shifting. I’m going to be honest here: at the time, I was completely wrong in how I handled this, but my 23-year-old self was blinded by “the math.”

MegaCorp #1 had implemented a “quota” system for management. At the time, only about 10% of the engineers in the company were women. However, the company wanted 50% of its managers to be women. All managers had to be engineers.  To a kid who worshipped statistics, this math didn’t work. It meant that almost every female engineer was being promoted to manager within three years, while senior engineers I respected—the “data guys”—were being passed over.

There are both good and bad engineers. It doesn’t matter what sex you are. I didn’t want to work for a bad one.

I didn’t keep these thoughts to myself. I had very limited  history with my “new” proposed manager, but I parroted the opinions of the older engineers I admired. I sat in a meeting with the Senior Manager, who I  knew to be well respected,  of the department I was in —a man who oversaw three engineering managers—and I let him know exactly what I thought of the woman he wanted me to work for.

I told him I didn’t respect her engineering skills and then I went on a rant about why I thought she was in her role. I was “fighting for meritocracy,” or so I told myself. I spoke with way too much conviction.

What I didn’t consider was that all three of this Senior Manager’s direct reports—the three managers he had hand-picked and mentored—were women. I wasn’t just insulting my potential boss; I was insulting my senior boss’s judgment and his entire leadership team.

Career Lesson #6: Know when you are fighting an unwinnable corporate fight. 

Career Lesson #7 : Know when you are putting your manager in a no-win situation.

Career Lesson #8: Lunch table talk with your buddies is for blowing off steam—nothing else. Never take “venting” sessions and turn them into a soapbox.

Unsurprisingly, I was moved again. My third department in less than a year.

Strike 3: The Cowboy

In this third department, I actually landed on a high-profile, highly visible program. I was the assistant to the Project Manager. I had moved out of pure engineering and into Project Management.

I decided to keep my head down. I did good work. In fact, I did great work. Whenever a technical issue popped up on the line, people started coming to me instead of the Project Manager. I’d find the root cause, fix the flow, and keep the line moving. In my mind, I was the hero. I was “on fire.” Surely, the higher-ups were noticing that I was the one actually holding the project together.

There was a lot of whispering about the Project Manager herself. She was struggling. And, to be objective, she really wasn’t suited for the role. But my past lessons should have taught me to stay out of the line of fire.

I didn’t.

At the time, we were running 24-hour operations. I was coming in for shift crossovers at 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM just to make sure the “on-the-fly” changes I’d implemented were working. The PM was nowhere to be found. The running joke in the shop was that you could judge the seniority of the people in her meetings by how many buttons were undone on her blouse. I saw it myself; she would literally “adjust” before heading into meetings.

One day, her boss called me into a one-on-one meeting. This guy was a “good old boy”—he wore cowboy boots, had a ranch, and just happened to be a Project Engineering Manager. I liked him because he seemed like a straight shooter. He spoke his mind, “both six-shooters going off,” and I admired that.

He started digging for information on my boss. He asked me to be frank. He asked me point-blank: “Can she do the job?”

The door was closed. It was a one-on-one. He gave me “permission” to speak freely. I thought, Finally, a guy who wants the truth. I didn’t go overboard. I just gave him one honest sentence: “No, she can’t do the job.”

He thanked me for my honesty and my hard work. I walked out feeling like I’d finally found my work spot.

The next day, we had a large staff meeting . The Senior Manager (the Cowboy), my boss, and half a dozen others were in the room. Without warning, the Senior Manager looked at my boss and told the entire group that I had told him she couldn’t do her job.

He used a 23-year-old kid to publicly shame a manager who had been with the company for years. He took my “confidential” feedback and turned it into a weapon to humiliate her in front of her peers. I wanted to crawl under the floorboards.

In that moment, I realized my career at MegaCorp #1 was over. I was the kid who had bounced through three departments in a year and had now “betrayed” his manager.

Career Lesson #9: Give trust only when it is earned and shown. 

Life Lesson #5: Know when you are dealing with someone who is just using you as a tool for their own agenda.

Career Lesson #10: Company politics matter more than the data.

Knowing When to Fold ‘Em

I could read the data on the wall. I had unintentionally pissed off almost every female engineer and half the management team in the building. Even if I was “right” about the technical failures or the incompetence, I had handled every situation the wrong way. I had killed any career path in this company.

On my own I started looking for a new job a week later.

This was a massive financial mistake in the short term. MegaCorp #1 went public about two years later. If I had stayed, kept my mouth shut in my first year, the employee stock options and the discounted pre-IPO shares would have likely set me up for life before I even hit 30. I watched from afar as the stock rocketed during the tech bubble.

But I couldn’t stay. The bridge wasn’t just burned; it was vaporized. Within six weeks, I was packing my car and moving across the country to start over.

I was a “failed” engineer with a year of experience, a bruised ego, and a new understanding that the “green boards” were the easy part. The “people” were the hard part.

Stay tuned for Part3, where I take these lessons—and a few new ones—to a new province.