Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
(Engineer, for reference.)
Loved legos as a kid. I guess that kind of showed where I was going, huh? Also got lucky that my high school still had design and tech-related electives, so I got a leg up on that before I even hit college.
Worked in a tool & die shop for a small company while I was in college. It was a rough job - small business operating on the razor’s edge - but it was a good introduction to real-world manufacturing processes and environments. Having to actually machine and assemble stuff by hand taught me more about designing for manufacturability than any course ever could, and I think every engineer should spend some time making things before they try and design them. Definitely wouldn’t call that particular business enjoyable, though.
Got my first real engineering position at a power generating company. Interesting place. Burned literal turns of garbage to generate power and recycle almost anything they could. Very safety-focused. Honestly, if the commute hadn’t been absolutely awful, I might have stuck it out with them longer, but “spend two hours of your day driving” was just terrible.
Then found my current position, which is as an engineer at a smaller high-tech company in aerospace. Hours are great, co-workers are fantastic, the job is interesting, I like my boss, pay and benefits are absolute dogshit.
The engineering field is definitely one of those where you’re “encouraged” to shop around and switch jobs every few years. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. Terrible for employees and terrible for businesses, who are perpetually losing institutional knowledge. I don’t know why they don’t fix this. I’m coming up on the point where I’m going to have to choose between “a comfortable job” and “a well-paying job”, and I don’t know what I’ll do.