donnfelker

There's a number of you (engineer + doctor), though quite rare. I have a few friends who are engineers as well as doctors. You're like unicorns in your field. The Neo and Morpheus of the medical industry - you can see things and understand things that most people cant in your typical field (medicine). Kudos to you!

Oh yes it is. I have worked on projects where highly trained specialized doctors have helped train the models (or trained them themselves) to catch random very difficult to notice conditions via radiology. Some of these systems are deployed at different hospitals and medical facilities around the country. The radiologist still does there job, but some odd, random hard to notice conditions, AI is a literal life saver. For example, pancreas divisum, a abnormality in the way the pancreas ducts fail to fuse/etc can cause all kinds of insane issues. But its not something most people know about or look for. AI can pick that up in a second. It can then alert the radiologist of an abnormality and they can then verify. It's enhacing the capabilties of radiologists.

I was never mentored by any super great engineers. Worked with some brights ones, but never got formally taught by them.

The way I excelled from beginner to a higher level engineer was self learning, curiosity, building things so I could understand them. Example: when learning dependency injection, I found a tutorial on how to build your own DI container. So i built one and saw how it worked internally. That was SUPER useful.

I recommend Podcasts, YouTube Videos, Courses, Conferences, Participating in Open Source (even writing docs that are missing is helpful). Ultimately its about using what you learn and always being curious, learning patterns, and what is useful vs what is not.

A fitness community. This could be either a BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) place or even a CrossFit gym. I've done both and while I'm not here to promote CrossFit, I am here to say that a group fitness class is awesome for meeting other people and finding a community of people that do something similar as you, but have absolutely nothing to do with your work.

I workout with Police officers, Lawyers, Doctors, Dentists, Stay at home moms, Accountants, Students, other tech folks, etc, you name it they're all there.

There's something about "shared misery" that brings people together and builds a comrade. That turns into a community where you start to hang out with them out of the gym/etc.

This happens at any group fitness place where the same people show up at the same time to do the same thing. It's natural, organic and freeing.

I've moved across the country 3 times now and this is how I integrated into each area I moved into.

Well said.

This.

If one employee is remote, the entire company must act as if all employees are remote. Otherwise, this will happen. It's happened to me as well.

I highly recommend it. I use it at a client extensively and have grown to rely on it heavily for its ability to provide a hermetic testing environment with mobile apps (android).

Buf!

Good to see you're still around. :fist-bump:

This.

> Leaving a support system/family behind if you have a child (and considering another child) is not trivial.

So much this. Soooo much.

Moving to SF/SV sounds fun, until you look at the quality of life. If you're hellbent on going this route, IMO you should possibly consider the NYC route and live in NJ. Your prices will be high as well, but the quality of life is much better. You can easily commute into NYC via train and then get back to NJ and have some ability to have a "normal life" without being in the city.

That said, there are other options. Look at WeWorkRemotely.com and RemoteOk.io for remote jobs. Get a good job, work remotely and have a good quality of life.

I almost went down the SF/SV route many times. Each time I ran the pros/cons and SF/SV has the worse return on life value for a family, IMO than almost anywhere. I've worked remotely for nearly 9 years and love this life. No commuting. Just my .02.

You can either ping existing authors or hit up the publishers. Squeaky wheel gets the grease. They're always looking for folks.