The Career Pivot

Career pivots, a journey I’ve navigated several times, invoke excitement, fear, anticipation, anxiety, hope and a multitude of other emotions. But my favorite aspect of a successful career pivot is the myriad of new pathways and opportunities it unfolds, not just in terms of career advancement but also in learning and personal growth. Everyone does it at least once in their life when transitioning from high school or college to the work force. It's scary. Everything's new. It's exciting! Some of us even find ourselves pivoting again later in our careers.

My first job out of school was at a music store as an electronic repair technician. I applied for the job having no real hands-on experience. Fortunately they needed a tech and were willing to train. I had the opportunity to fix all kinds of electronic music gear including synthesizers, electric pianos, organs, effects units, EQs, mixing consoles, power amplifiers, tube amplifiers, drum machines, computers and even some VCRs, TVs and fog machines. It was a great opportunity to learn about the many ways electronic devices can fail, how they're designed and how to fix them. After 5 years and 5,000+ component-level electronic repairs, I started getting the bug to try something new. It was 1993 and I taught myself C programming on the side by cobbling together a little game I named "MacBrickout" (because it was a brick bashing game on the Mac). I showed it to one of the customers of the music store and they showed it to a friend that was starting a video game development company. That friend reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in a job programming console video games. I took the opportunity, leaving the world of electronic repair and embarking on a new adventure as a software engineer. Pivot number 1.

Everything was new. New tools, new processes, new people, new problems to solve, new coding practices to learn. It was like trying to drink from a firehose. Every day brought a new challenge but the electronic repair work taught me to be persistent and stick with the problem until it was solved. I had to learn how to program the 68000 microprocessor in assembly language. I learned about CVS, a tool to save revisions of the source code. With perseverance, we cranked out our first game, Road Rash for the Sega CD. The team grew and we explored new platforms (Sega 32X, 3D0, Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn). We made several different game prototypes. The technology was still young and we had to build all of the rendering functionality ourselves. This included matrix math calculations, camera transforms, collision detection routines, polygon subdivision, and depth cueing (fading the color of far away objects to make them look distant). We built an entire game engine from scratch and used it in Courier Crisis which was released for the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. The game industry was still young and we hadn't learned how to properly manage burnout and, unfortunately I succumbed. After five intense but wonderful years, I had to call it quits. Our first child was just born and it really wasn't a good time for me to be leaving my job but for my mental health, it still was the best decision. Pivot number 2.

Being a stay-at-home dad is awesome. During this 2.5 year stint in addition to all the usual child raising duties, I worked on a new, fancier version of MacBrickout. Fortunately, my daughter liked to take 5-hour power naps! Some of my time was spent fixing the TVs for Jack Murphy Stadium (later Qualcomm Stadium). They had 1,000 TVs installed on site and every week, they would bring 4 or 5 in for repair. Eventually our second child was born. As my free time dwindled, I felt increasingly drawn back to the workforce. My wife was also needing a change and was wanting to be home more with the kids. A friend from the old music store days called and asked if I could design a little project for him that used a microcontroller and a stepper motor. “Electronics and programming. That's in my wheelhouse,” I thought. I said "sure!".? "Oh,” he said, "...and you have to get it done in four days.” Over a weekend I studied the programming guide for the 8051 Microcontroller. My prior experience ramping up quickly on new game console hardware helped here. The following Monday I dug in and somehow managed to eke out the completed project within the specified timeframe. The company he worked for was impressed and offered me a job as a hardware/firmware engineer. My time away from the workforce allowed me to gain perspective on what I wanted to do next. I was ready to do something new but I knew I wasn’t ready to go back into game development or repair work. My wife quit her job to become a stay-at-home mom and I accepted the offer and embarked on what would become a 10-year career in engineering. Pivot number 3.

That first project gave me some confidence about working with microcontrollers which was helpful but my technical vocabulary was still lacking in some common EE terminology such as SPI, I2C, Gerber files, pulse width modulation and a plethora more. I was drinking from that firehose again. Every project offered an opportunity to learn something new. I learned how to get chips to communicate with each other on a board and how to get them to communicate with the outside world via a serial interface. Effectively using interrupts to handle time sensitive tasks became a skill. I got experience drawing schematics, laying out circuit boards, bringing up boards for the first time. All that repair work early in my career paid off allowing me to catch errors during design reviews. I wrote firmware for many different processor architectures, created a 3D machine vision system, designed a single-board ink jet printer from scratch (and wrote all the firmware for it), made many medical products, and programmed several consumer printers for HP. One exciting moment was when I got a prototype of Kodak’s first all-in-one printer to print its very first page. That page ended up framed on some executive’s wall.

After a decade though, that familiar urge to try something new started to come back. A friend was looking for a new opportunity as well. It was 2009. Over the course of a month, we tossed some ideas back and forth. Since we’re both musicians and programmers, we thought a music collaboration website would be fun. We got discouraged though when we found several other companies were doing it already. “How about making iPhone apps?”, he asked. I was intrigued. The iPhone was still relatively new. I bought a book that walked me through several aspects of iPhone programming. Soon I had my first app completed, Voltage Divider. It was a handy engineering utility to help pick resistor values when designing switching power supplies (or any circuit that uses a common resistive voltage divider). I was liking this new platform a lot! I quit my job to start a company making iPhone apps for clients. My friend hopped on board too and we co-founded “Ditty Labs” (we liked the name that we had come up with for the music collaboration website and since a ditty is a short little song and an app is a little application, we felt the name still fit). Pivot number 4.

It was a lot to take on: Starting a new company from scratch, learning to program a new platform, figuring out how to find clients and how to estimate projects. A few friends tossed us a bone and gave us a few small projects to work on but our first big project didn’t come until about 6 months after we started the company. The client, Binary Labs, had several web-based learning apps in their portfolio and was looking to create apps for the iPad. We worked with them to create Dexteria, an app used to improve hand-eye coordination, especially for those that have suffered an injury or disability. After a successful launch, we worked with Binary Labs to make several more apps in the Dexteria family. We also partnered with ChiroTouch to port their PC based chiropractic practice management software to the iPad. We made a prototype golf game for a client. A Bitcoin wallet and business directory was crafted for Airbitz (now Edge). Every project offered new opportunities to learn and new people to meet and work with. I particularly liked the variety of working conditions. Sometimes the client was a single person working out of their home. Other times it was a company (like GoPro or Dexcom) that wanted us to work on-site. Working with 20+ clients of all sizes, I got to experience many different management styles and accumulated mental notes on what works best. I learned the importance communication and my skills along those lines have blossomed. I could keep going on this path but that notion to do something new is subtly starting to manifest, especially after having worked on 60+ apps. Knowing this notion won’t go away, I believe pivot number 5 is on the horizon.

I’m not sure where this new path will take me. My passion is steering me toward video games again. I’ve spent the past year learning Unity 3D and Blender and figured it’s time to refresh my now 30-year old game, MacBrickout. There’s a MacBrickout Facebook page if you’re interested in following along on the progress. If MacBrickout does well enough to keep the lights on, I’ve got several other game ideas to put into the pipeline. I’ve also been tinkering with KiCad, a schematic capture and board layout tool. It might be fun to make some electronic kits that inspire young folks to get into electronics and software development (and off of TikTok). I’ve also taken a liking to restoring old arcade machines from the early ’80’s. Not sure if there’s any money in that but it’s a fun hobby for someone that likes working with their hands.

Well that’s my story in a nutshell. It has been an enlightening career so far with every pivot bringing new opportunities on both the financial and personal growth fronts. If you've been contemplating something different, I offer these words with confidence:

It’s OK to make a drastic change in your career path.

Looking back at all the projects I’ve worked on (from cleaning cat pee out of a Yamaha keyboard, repairing burnt or cracked circuit boards, tracking down an elusive glitch with an oscilloscope, to writing a game engine from scratch,? completing multiple game projects, building things with motors, sensors, lights and displays and making a ton of iPhone apps), I feel these pivots were essential in helping me develop the unique perspective I have today. If you decide to pivot your career, the change will likely lead you to new opportunities and while it’s risky and scary, I believe the universe will conspire to make everything work out for you. The reward will be worth it.

Follow your passion.

Carson Whitsett

Links:

MacBrickout: https://facebook.com/MacBrickout

Ditty Labs: https://www.dittylabs.com

x.com: @CarsonWhitsett