…and it is not all on me, just part of it.
In this essay I will tentatively tell in some sort of autobiography how I messed up with my career and what may be the way out of this mess. I won't explore any details or feelings, but stick to facts, my observations at each of the episodes, and my takes about the happenings.
It has never been questioned in my circles that I was some sort of gifted child. But certainly, I was not what you first think about when hearing about someone gifted. I could read and write in some rudimentary ways before age 4 — and that led me to opening Pandora’s box. By age 6 I had read most of the encyclopedias we had at home, my main interests being history, art, and engineering; at that time, I was already able to discuss with adults on these topics and most kids were embarrassingly boring to me. It was reading and reading and reading that time was spent.
Numismatics came next and, in a few years, I was not just a kid collecting lost coins around the house, but the one with in depth knowledge of the characters being depicted, historical events, and an actual set of collectible coins; needless to say, that really developed my interest in metals. Ah, and before I forget, at the same time I was also really into rocks and geology, always digging around looking for gems, which at the time I was often able to identify, and when stuck I would recur to the local natural history museum geologist for help. I know I should have been running and playing around by that time, but it simply was not my thing, so I ended up not developing good motor skills by then.
For the next ten years or so I barely had to study for school because I had self-taught me everything that was in the curriculum, so I could spend my time learning new subjects that had come to my attention, especially university level ones. Because of that only on a few occasions I was the first of my class since I never reviewed, but most of the time the second or third at most. The profile of the ones on the top was really the dedicated ones, those who were seeing the topics for the first time and delving in the subjects for the exams. My view on then was of demise cause most of the time it was clear their actual grasp of what was behind things.
By age 11 my interest in sports grew; I had always been fond of adventure and then I started mountain biking. That was the first time I really socialized and by age 16 you couldn’t tell anymore that I had been that weird child — finally I was a normal person. Or not. Because of those highly cultural beginnings you could tell some features wouldn’t really let me fit in with my pairs. So finally, the last year before college I got back to my roots and studied everything once again, but 16h+ per day, no eating, no sleeping — sometimes cheap vodka — and managed to get accepted in first place at some major universities around my place, but that is the matter of the next paragraph.
Tired. That’s how you describe my early days at college. Hormones blowing up and tiredness. So many years reading and reading got me tired. I essentially had learned what I thought was enough to already get my diploma and start working or something like that. First semester was not great intellectually speaking but after I few months I put my head in place and started working hard. Got a job in a lab. Some of the experimental work I was carrying used to be very boring and take many hours. For safety reasons you had to stay there to make sure everything was fine. But you know me, any free time and I will start reading. By the end of the first year, I had finished studying — exercises included — most of the books I needed to read for the next two years or so, and that didn’t prevent me of partying a lot.
Everything seems fine so far but that is not actually true. While I was the highest performing student of my class and got moderately social, this was the turning point where performance started to mess things up. I was following my undergraduate studies in Materials Engineering with focus in Mechanics — in Brazil you get Materials Engineering to be associated to Mechanical or Chemical Engineering, and your diploma is not actually in Materials Engineering in the end — but since most of Materials Science topics are about having a good memory and knowing how analyse and to put things together to get things done, I diverged into the neighboring engineering schools and sometimes in the Physics department.
I was often taking classes at other undergraduate courses and when not available, I would take lecture notes and study them anyway. I managed to become better at plain Mechanical Engineering than I was in pure Materials Engineering and sometimes taught subjects to friends following that course. Here we notice that I completely changed subjects since I was a child: from history and art, now I was into applied mathematics and thermal engines. Things always had a limit to me, but not because of difficulty; once I have a feeling of being able to go beyond in a subject by myself, I also start to get bored. The grasp of the generality of a subject fulfils my curiosity.
By the fifth and last year I was considering a PhD in Germany but finally I decided to stay a bit more around. In fact, I was no longer feeling like I wanted to stay in academia and got a particularly respectable job offer that I sticked with; more on that next.
By age 22 I was an engineer; later than I expected but I didn’t tell you that my parents refused to let me skip a few years at school as some of my tutors proposed at some point. This could have been much earlier but then I would be jobless or following a PhD in the Humanities. That was not the case, before even getting my diploma I already had the job offer and the transition from intern to actual engineer happened overnight as I got my diplomas. In fact, nothing changed — except that they started paying me a decent salary quite above the average at that time.
So, I started working in a not that technical position. At first, I was writing technical specifications for materials and mechanical construction of metallic parts, but soon someone realized that my strongest feature was my negotiation skills and from that day I was often defending deviations from technical requirements with the customers and proposing technical alternatives. It was a very transversal job with interaction with all levels from the shop floor to the high management. It didn’t take long for me to start living in an airplane going to technical audits all around and to participate at the defining stages of scope of commercial supply in large projects. By this time, my hobby was learning a little bit of every language I was able to, and I did that with religious fervor.
So far you may think all this took me at least 5 years to accomplish, but in fact it lasted only 1 year and 10 months. The main reason I excelled at this position was that whole random background I carried with strong scientific culture, good history knowledge, and on general matters. It became natural to me to start a conversation with anyone and later develop links that allowed huge gains in negotiation. My career was on track, and it seemed very promising. But I told you already that once I reached a certain level of generality, I need a change.
At some point I found myself there and had the urge to reach out a previous internship advisor in France. When I first worked in his team, I didn’t do a fantastic job as I try to most of the time, but anyways he had good views of me and offered me a PhD. In a few months it was me again in a plane flying once again to France. What made me interested in the PhD offer he proposed me was the fact that I already knew most of the literature on the subject, so that would allow me to get back and finish some open ends from my undergraduate studies. I didn't expect to make I great thesis, just to follow the rules and get a PhD. What matters is what you learn on your free time, that's what life taught me so far.
There I would finally go deeper in fluid dynamics and reacting flows, two subjects that always were among my favorite ones. Also, in the part of the thesis related to materials, I would be able be learn more about diffusion and some microscopy techniques of my interest. So, hands to work, I could already code in C++ by that time and started with that to perform my numerical analyses. Soon I was coding in several programming languages and grasped the use of many scientific software, what a delight! The intellectual and social environment was interesting and whenever I got bored with my own matters, I went see some friends in the building and see how I could help them. It was the first time in my life that I felt in a place where you could develop interesting ideas and talk to people who would understand you. But academia can also be harsh, especially when you graduate — the competition among researchers in some cases reach an extremally toxic level, so once I finished, I didn’t even try to get a post-doc and ended up in industry again, but this time in a research center.
If there is one thing you learn during a PhD is the sense of generality; not that I needed that, so far you understand that this is my main characteristic — I was just looking for a piece of paper stating that I had accomplished that. It is not difficult for a PhD to identify another without even asking, you notice in the way people speak and the things they are interested at. In my whole life I just met three people who didn’t graduate that behaved that way and I find that amazing — and two of them are a couple, what is even more mind blowing. So, when I started my new job, I was looking to interact with people matching this level of general views. The problem is that industry hurts; some people get greedy over the years; some completely loose interest; but a few stick to their core. Nonetheless, I managed to identify these last group and for a few years I was productive.
Yes, once again I gained lots of new skills. With the scientific computing background, I built over the years it was easy for me to start in machine learning. Yes, I survived the boom of machine learning in 2018 and conducted many proof-of-concept projects in the field but managed to stay linked to my core engineering skills. I also contributed to vulgarizing the use of some open-source software people were not using yet. Ever since the start of my PhD I lost contact with supply chain and quality related people, but always tried to keep using to a lesser level what I learned there and applied that to my project management. On the technical side, most of my work was in some sort related to skills — but not subjects — I developed during my PhD. This time and only this time it was not my loss of interest in a subject that messed things, but the feeling that some people were working in closed silos and only for self-marketeering themselves. I don’t know how this could be a reality in a private company — you simply get rid of people not willing to play the game, unless you are in France, obviously. The overall environment was technically challenging, and you could have nice discussions and growth with some colleagues, but not everyone was willing to collaborate.
After trying a lot to overcome some barriers and break some silos, by a miracle I got a phone call with a job offer elsewhere — my current position. There were quite a few incoherencies in what they proposed me but that was because my field was something new to them, so I was quite sure those points could be fixed; I promptly accepted the offer without much thinking. I packed my stuff and in one month there I was, full of motivation. The team was nice and welcoming and the company much smaller, exactly what I thought I was looking for. The ground was lacking foundations, so I started developing some basic tools to build what in a few years I expected to be a project portfolio. Also, there was the possibility to in about two years have my own team of numerical guys, what was motivating.
In practice things weren’t that smooth. First, they didn’t research what was required to get some numerical work done; you need expensive computers. Then comes the fact that you get people specialized in fields of applied mathematics — there is no such 1990s Discovery Channel simulation generalist. If you read attentively so far, you noticed that in my previous job I finally managed to stick to a subject, or at least a small family of related subjects. Now I started to get people asking me if I could run some molecular dynamics in the same simulation of macroscale transport or predict the age of their grandmother: it was driving me nuts. For a while I really thought they would fire me without even knowing why. In a few months things settled down a bit and requests became more consistent with my skills. Some people understood that fluid dynamics applied to materials processing is still a research field and many things that may seem trivial to the layman are quite challenging. Others are still annoying about the limitations of what I can offer today.
Since I was the first numerical person in the company I had to fight battles against an incompetent IT with senseless rules; then I confirmed the company was really capital-driven only, and to my disappointment I was feeling mismanaged. During this time things went awry because I started suffering from impostor syndrome — sorry guys, I can’t make DFT calculations coupled to CFD — and entered a bottomless pit of trying to learn everything else again. To add to my disappointment and endless lies that have been told to me, instead of getting a team in the middle term, I will get a new colleague to work with me. All the work towards really understanding my field and its people were thrown to the rubbish by people who are not even close to be qualified to manage me: experience do not mean capacity, a mistake people from past generations often do. I started becoming grumpier and grumpier, face severe lack of concentration, it became impossible to sleep, and intellectual loneliness is really killing me. These people were not ready for me, not the inverse, which is clear now.
So, what may be the way out of this mess? I have no clue!
My only certainty right now is that I am quitting in the extremely short term; I no longer try to hide my urge of change.
The branching of my knowledge made me useless to the standard market and I am still too young to occupy the positions I have developed the skills for because it is not socially acceptable.
Current job descriptions require sharp skills, but during the past three years the intellectually poor environment I am at destroyed anything I had left to offer.
I am now incapacitated to get back to jobs like my first one where I outperformed because of my social skills were ravaged during the past months.
Academia would be a solution but since I didn’t publish enough while in nor chained PhD with a post-doc, it is highly improbable I would get in again.
I will become a farmer, or what else?