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Four years ago, I was bored and talking to a friend of mine, joking about starting a scientific equipment business in a small niche (geophysics) where there was effectively only one competitor in our national market. Easy to disrupt. To my surprise, he said yes and we went all in. Still just the two of us, but I guess I didn't have to apply for that job, just have a fortuitous connection. Now I do the science parts and he does the business parts and it works great! Probably we will hire this year though, and it's very likely that LinkedIn will be the place we advertise.
The last tool I used? Does email count? ;) Ground Penetrating Radar.
My old job was servicing niche scientific equipment. Glad to see you saw that opportunity - there are a lot of shitty products out there selling for five or six figures, and often running technology multiple decades out of date.
I need to hire a service technician this year. Someone with soldering skills, most likely. What skills did you use to get your prior job? What were you taught on the job? Pure curiosity.
Mostly on the job learning. Had an IT background and basic electronics skills including crude soldering at the time, but mostly I was just good at troubleshooting and thinking through problems. Every machine was very specialised so it was hard to get much info and a lot of problems were unique to that machine for that user with that sample in that condition...
Yeah, that sounds about right. Did they run you through some soldering training kits or something, or were you just thrown at the problem to "learn by doing"?
Also, how was the pay relative to what you could have gotten had you focused on the IT background instead?
I'm contemplating trying to hire for an automotive technician skillset -- someone that has a background doing things like alarms and custom radio installs, because there is such a nice skillset overlap. Hiring from IT might work, but I don't think I can meet pay and progression expectations. But the IT guys probably appreciate the science aspect more, on average.
I was pretty much thrown in and learnt on the job. I shadowed another technician for a bit that showed the basic maintenance servicing steps for the major machines, but then went out on my own. I'm in Australia and we had instruments in all major cities as well as New Zealand, so it involved a lot of flying around and fitting in as many customers as possible. So I had to be able to troubleshoot fast and ideally fix things on the spot.
Often it involved figuring out a temporary workaround whilst a part would need to be ordered from the US or similar issues. My main skillset was being able to think quickly like this and improvise. Being able to understand exactly what a machine is doing (not just the theory the lab techs were thinking about, actual things like gas fill reservoir A, valve 3 open to reservoir B with vacuum guage etc) was more important than anything else I feel. Especially considering we were a small company so couldn't afford to carry around every conceivable spare part, not much of the machinery was based on off-the-shelf parts so we mostly carried the most likely parts to be needed in general.
My IT background was mostly useful for dealing with the inevitable issues with their terrible 16-bit era (!!) software and trying to get it running on Windows 10. Of course the manufacturer wanted them to just replace the system with the new model, but they were exactly the same internals with just newer controller cards running (very very slightly) updated software. This would cost up to a quarter of a million dollars, so you can imagine that not many customers were excited to jump on that!
I would say the automotive technician skillset likely overlaps a little better, especially if they are from the electrical side. My IT skills were useful as I mentioned (and I could talk-the-talk with the university or corporate IT teams in order to get required permissions etc) but most of the harder problems were physical and electronic in nature. As you mentioned, I was interested in the science part too, and funnily enough a couple of the universities got me in to teach the theory of what the systems were measuring, which I literally just figured out on the job haha
Of course, this all depends on exactly what kind of equipment you are talking about. For reference, I mostly dealt with gas adsorption, mercury porosimetry, laser or vision particle sizing and helium pycnometry. We also worked with a few other bits and pieces here and there, but that was the vast majority.
Oh, in terms of pay, I took a massive pay cut to work there. I'd been in IT for about 12 years and needed a change. I knew the boss of the company from Judo training and he asked if I'd be interested in joining. Not the most normal career path but I figured it sounded interesting.
Sorry for the rambling structure, I'm at work and was jumping back and forth to here as I could.
It sounds like you enjoyed it, and it tickled the right parts of your brain for a while. I hope I can find someone like you when the time comes :)
Yeah, definitely needed to move on after so long but I certainly learnt a lot from it!