Today marks my three month anniversary at Qualcomm. Well, technically tomorrow would be three months, but tomorrow is Saturday. I feel that I have finally come up to speed with what I need to do and have started accomplishing things and making a difference.
I have come somewhat full circle now. In college, I took a class entitled High Performance Computing. We learned how to write programs to take advantage of multiple computing resources (mostly multiple CPUs, be they within a single machine or spread across multiple machines). After the final paper, the professor asked if I would like to do graduate-level work with him. At the time I turned him down, but now I am working with a massive grid of computers and returning to do graduate-level work is looking all the more tempting (particularly since Qualcomm will help foot the bill).
About once a day or so, I stop and think how much better this job is than my last and how much happier I’ve been. The incident last month with my last company really demonstrates how bad it was. Sadly, I could have skipped all those years of worthless Web development (the development I did, not to say that Web development itself is worthless). Back around 1997, I was offered an internship at Qualcomm, but I turned it down. Oh well, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Hey, the most important thing is to learn from your mistakes for the future… not to beat yourself up for them, y’know?
Indeed.
I meant to say a little something along those lines in my original post, but forgot. I like to think I’ve learned quite a bit over the last few years. The important thing is that I’ve gotten where I am now, not how perfect I managed to make the journey. Who knows? Maybe I’m better off for it.
Oh, and thanks for taking the time for pointing that out.