“Your First Job Will Decide What You Will Become”

Often we end up following the herd to such an extent that we lose our own focus of what we want to become, that’s when we make mistakes that are tough to correct. Especially when it comes to choosing money or learning it becomes difficult to choose jobs. Having explored all the sectors of the industry, govt, private and start-ups for 30+ years, the industry veteran Srinivas Moorthy, Srinivasa Moorthy, Founder & Director, Nimaya Robotics; Director Design Engineering, D4X Technologies Pvt Ltd; . shares his journey, his ups, and downs, advice and tips to excel to future engineers with Ankita KS from EFY group. A glimpse of his fascinating journey follows…

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 Q. Can you brief about your journey in the industry for 30+ years?

A. I started my career after my masters (M.Tech) in 1985 at Centre for Development Of Telematics as a hardware engineer. I still remember 90 per cent of staff were engineers fresh out of college. I remember when we asked about the feasibility of designing (the stiff target of 36 Months – 36 Crores we must build a 16,000-line Digital Telephone Exchange) with fresh engineers, the management answered it two points!

1. You being Fresh don’t carry any baggage so you will learn the right things.
2. The seniors who were part of our organization have all failed in building Digital Telephone Exchanges in their career and know what should be avoided.

I see that relevant today. If seniors can teach engineers to avoid costly mistakes, you learn quickly. As part of my career, I have seen the technology which we use to deal with changed rapidly in the three decades I have worked. When I started my career as a designer I have used “Bishop’s Blue & Red Tape” for designing PCB’s manually and today I use sophisticated CAD to do auto routing of PCBs. The same is true with components from led to surface mount. Above all, we never had highspeed design issues but today that is a big challenge in board design. Only constant learning and adapting to newer technologies helped me to survive in this industry.

I have designed products for all type of applications (from Medical Devices to Avionics systems) which enabled my skills to be broad-based. Globally usable products need to be meeting multiple standards and I have gone through the grind to design products for those needs.

My sincere advice to every (fresh) engineer is that your first job will decide what you will become. So choose jobs wisely. If you compromise your job for money then, your career is doomed. Most engineers don’t understand this they chose jobs for money,  keep jumping jobs and never build vertical skill which makes them useless after 10 years!

Q. What are the key mistakes that you made that you think you should have avoided in hindsight? Any learnings?

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