Becoming a Bicycle Mechanic

[Jeff Wills]

"Mike S." <mikeshaw2@coxDOTnet> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
>
> I ended up in the financial business from the contacts I made at the shop. Working in a shop may
> not seem like the background to get into Mortgages and Financial Planning until you look at what
> you learn doing it. If you go into working at a shop as the be all end all of your career, forget
> it. If you go in to learn all you can about the bike business, business in general, networking,
> and use the shop time to make contacts in the business you eventually want to be in, then it is a
> good step.
>
> Go for it, but keep your eye on the long term goal at the same time.
>
> Mike

*Huh*- as long as the thread is shifting to career paths- I started out in the local bike shop when
I was still in high school, worked my way through bike wholesale stuff and then in into the
information catalog at Bike'alog. In all, I spent about 15 years in the bicycle business.

While at Bike'alog I met my (now) wife and she eventually convinced me to start a "career" working
with computers (big field, better money, etc.). So I did- with only a little formal training I got
into software testing. The funny thing is that I met my first software boss at a bike ride... and
I've made quite a few contacts through "bike connections".

As a matter of fact, I'm doing some volunteer software testing right now for a bicycle organization.
(I was laid off from my "real" job three weeks ago- another victim of the economic doldrums.) Things
aren't too bad- my wife's still working (she's a firmware engineer at H-P nowadays) and I've got
some specialized skills *now* that make me more valuable to employers.

The upshot of this is that I'm making three times as much money sitting on my butt in front of a
computer than I'd ever make working in a bike shop. I *loved* working in the shop- but if I want to
work on bikes now, I'll go into the garage and swap parts on one of my five.

The O.P. said his degree was in math- I met a couple of software engineers while I was temping at
H-P with advanced degrees in math: one PhD and one Masters. They were married to each other, too.
They seemed to regard the "work" they were doing as obscenely easy. There's got to be better places
for a math degree than the bike business.

Jeff

 

[David Reuteler]

Thomas Reynolds <[email protected]> wrote:
: Interesting. When I was in college I worked as a technician for a company that designed antennas.
: Almost all of the engineers that I worked for had physics degrees.
:
: At my current job we have 70 or so engineers, a few of which have math degrees, mostly doing
: crypo work.

after the recession ended most of the people i went to school with got jobs outside of physics/math
and often as you say, as engineers. i know 3 people who stayed within their fields (2 became
professors and one worked for a government lab). my point was only that most math majors probably
don't find work within their field. and further more, most probably don't expect to.

crypto work, otoh, would be a great use of a math degree. that's not engineering you heretic! ;-)
--
david reuteler [email protected]

 

[David Reuteler]

John Black <[email protected]> wrote:
: David, I am curious about what you did go into with your physics degree. It sounds like it is
: computer related. What specifically?

i did scientific computing (geophysics and mantle convection) which at the time meant numerical
methods (read Fortran and Crays) and scientific visualization (pretty 3d pictures on SGIs). actually
a pretty nice combo of science and computers. after that my career devolved into the more general
morass of UNIX/C/perl/java.
--
david reuteler [email protected]

 

[Thomas Reynolds]

David Reuteler <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:<[email protected]>...
> Thomas Reynolds <[email protected]> wrote:
> : Interesting. When I was in college I worked as a technician for a company that designed
> : antennas. Almost all of the engineers that I worked for had physics degrees.
> :
> : At my current job we have 70 or so engineers, a few of which have math degrees, mostly doing
> : crypo work.
>
> after the recession ended most of the people i went to school with got jobs outside of
> physics/math and often as you say, as engineers. i know 3 people who stayed within their fields (2
> became professors and one worked for a government lab). my point was only that most math majors
> probably don't find work within their field. and further more, most probably don't expect to.

When I said "establish yourself with a math degree" I meant getting a technical position, including
working as an engineer. Your first response talked about delivering pizzas and such, poles apart.

When I was a college freshman I thought modern physics (quarks, relativity, etc) was so cool I
talked to my professor about changing my major to physics. He told me the same thing that you said,
almost everyone he knows with a physics degree was working as an engineer.

Tom