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Actually I’m still working for a few more (3-5) years.

I was an electronics design engineer for AN/SQQ-89 and then technical manager on AN/BSY2 program. Started out as a sub hunter from the surface, to sub hunter/killer under sea. Then Experimental Physicist at an Electron/Positron Collider and from there into medical equipment design management. Currently working as design engineering manager for high speed commercial printers.

I’ve worked with a lot of engineers. Some are very good, others are really bad, not much in the middle. The Rooskies have some really imaginative engineers who can take absolute rubbish and still make it work. Chinese tend to be not as visionary, and choose to make things more complicated than is necessary. Indians tend to be the “easy way” and not the most robust designs (i.e overload components with too wide tolerances [i.e 10% resistor vs 1%] ). I’ve worked with some outstanding Germán engineers, and other Germans who were weapons-grade stupid.

For the most part all of these things were VFW’s (Very few Women) All positions were mostly white (>80%), a few Slants (in order of capability... Jap, Korean, Chi) one or two Indians who were uniformly the weakest.

The Indian are clannish, but that is because they fear losing their status and being deported if they haven’t made the jump to green card holder.

Since it's New Years and I feel sentimental, your cv brought back memories of working my way up from secretary to computer operator to systems software programmer, within several years. Just from reading manuals and taking some night classes in things like Boolean Algebra (seriously!), Fortran, Cobol. No college education! Finally, IBM started recruiting me; they were the A-team back then. Even though it was fun reading hexadecimal dumps to find the bad code in a register, it just wasn't my thing. Quit and went back to my original interest and finished college.

What's amazing about this story is that it is THE quintessential American story prior to the 1980’s. My Russian immigrant grandfather graduated 6th grade, then had to go to work. His first real job was at Edison Labs working on radios. They had backyard transistor radio kits in the 1910’s. Self-taught. He became factory supervisor for RCA building the first televisions prior to the crash in 1929. He said the college boys sent plans down to the factory where he stayed up all night making them work! Does this sound familiar?

I work with immigrants and younger people who haven't a CLUE what kind of world we grew up in. If I tell these stories, they just stare as if it's an impossible Utopian dream.

We're so fortunate to have lived in freedom, even for awhile.