Today was my last day with my current employer (big company, lots of employees in the Pacific Northwest, currently pissing off the NLRB). I was hired initially to do structural finite element analysis, which I found odd since I didn’t have a ton of FEA experience, but that was OK, because they really didn’t need someone to do FEA, but rather, someone who can write scripts that perform canned FEA routines. Not a lot of engineering judgment required for that, and not a lot of experience to be had. Although I did have fun updating some of their scripts into FORTRAN77 (shoot me now…). Still, they paid to move me here, so there is that.
Got tired of that after two years, and switched to a group that promised me I could do Computational Fluid Dynamics work, which, funnily enough, was what I wrote my Master’s Thesis on (using Java multi-threading to solve Navier-Stokes on a 3D mesh using explicit finite volume techniques), so I was excited. After 3 years with that group, despite telling my management multiple times that I want CFD work, I had done one CFD project, and spent the bulk of my time first using handbook methods to do aerodynamic analysis, and then converting a collection of spreadsheets into a stand-alone Java application (that was actually fun, as no one else knew how to write code, so I got to be as creative as I wanted without having ‘people who know better’ telling me ‘that’s not how we do it here’).
sigh…
On a whim, my wife sent me a job posting for a technical marketing engineer for a CFD software company. I thought, what the hell, and applied. Then I saw a link for other jobs at the company, checked the listings, and saw a posting for an application support engineer. I dropped my app on that one too. That was on a Sunday.
Monday morning I got a call back. Thursday that same week I was interviewing for the application support engineer position, and by the next Tuesday, I was being offered the job (which I accepted). Always amazing how quickly life can just turn on a dime.
The new job sounds like fun. Spend the first six months learning the software inside & out, then start getting assigned customers who hold licenses. If they have trouble getting the software to work, I help them. If they have trouble getting their mesh setup, or their solution to run, or their results to post-process, I help them. If someone needs a one-off job run and is not interested in a license agreement, I run their geometry on the cluster back at the office (for a nominal fee, of course). The customers run the gamut of industries, from automotive, to petroleum, to wind/water turbines, to HVAC, to acoustic analysis.
Basically, I get to be a CFD Jedi.
Only one downside. There is about an 80% chance (I’ll know for certain in October) that I’ll get relocated to the office in Irvine, CA. I’m not terribly thrilled at that prospect, as it means we’ll have to sell the house in this market, and I’ll have to sell or somehow store most of my guns (I only have 5) because the safe isn’t coming with us, and we have no intentions of buying property in CA (and I anchor safes to the floor/walls, permanently). Still, the experience I’ll gain, and the networking & contacts I’ll gain, and the opportunity to make a name for myself, is just too much to pass up.
So if anyone in the Seattle-ish area wants a Mosin long rifle, or a Glenfield lever action in 30-30, or a Bersa Thunder in .380ACP, they are all available. I’ll most likely keep the Judge and the Mossberg 500, although if anyone wants to offer me space in their safe, I’ll be happy to leave you with use of the guns and all the ammo I have for them.
Now, I’ve had 