What were/are you most proud of in your career?

[REWahoo]

True. I'm also proud of my self-restraint.

 

[W2R]

Always sticking with what I thought was right and good, that I could be proud of, so that I could hold my head up high. Then, doing the best possible job that I could within those boundaries.

 

[HFWR]

...completed all required continuing education courses.

I passed the fire extinguisher class every year for 25 years!

I was good at what I did, and was rewarded by being laid off twice.

 

[NW-Bound]

True. I'm also proud of my self-restraint.

I was thinking of your military years, but then you were not flying fighters or bombers, I guess.

 

[REWahoo]

+1

I was mostly passing gas...

 

[MichaelB]

I was mostly passing gas...

They say it only gets worse as you age.

 

[REWahoo]

Haven't done it for almost 40 years. Maybe that's why I feel a bit bloated?

 

[MRG]

Helping advance an industry that we all rely on.

 

[M Paquette]

Inventing stuff that several hundred million people use every day is probably what I'm most proud of. Almost everywhere I go I get to see people using stuff I did, which is about the biggest kick I can think of for an engineer.

 

[Car-Guy]

Getting out of Houston

I was going to say I was most proud of having a very successful career at Mega Corp but getting out of Houston certainly is high on my list too.

 

[HFWR]

Haven't done it for almost 40 years. Maybe that's why I feel a bit bloated?

I feel an extinction event coming on...

Inventing stuff that several hundred million people use every day is probably what I'm most proud of. Almost everywhere I go I get to see people using stuff I did, which is about the biggest kick I can think of for an engineer.

Though I hold some patents that never amounted to much, I did work on some "stuff" that ended up in cellphones and computers. That, and $5, will get me a cup of burnt Starbucks...

As I recall, DRAMs of the time when I started were a whopping 64k! But I was in process development, so others were doing the xtor/circuit design.

 

[Sarah in SC]

Working with my dad on our family farm from my teens to early 20s and getting to see him at his best. I learned a lot about how to deal with people, with adversity, and with family. Not bad lessons.

 

[Walt34]

Making a difference in the lives of other people, and I did. I posted about it here in another thread several years ago. And I remember several times taking someone to jail and as the door slid shut they looked at me and said "Thank you". The first time that happened the guy saw my expression and explained "You treated me decent".

 

[brewer12345]

You all must have had far more meaningful careers than I did...

 

[MBAustin]

In 1981, I was writing a new module for a computer system that still had modules in it from the early 1960's. So I convinced my boss that I should write all of the date routines for the new module to be Y2K compliant, figuring if some of it had lasted 20 years already, there was a decent chance mine would make it to Y2K. (Didn't stick around to find out, though.)

Mostly, though, it's about people who thanked me for being a good boss in various ways over the years. It was also great to hear from the HR coach on a 360-feedback report that I was the only person she had ever seen with "Integrity" as their top characteristic.

 

[Badger]

The success of my students, my reputation as a college professor, the pride and joy it gave my parents.

Cheers!

 

[freebird5825]

Most of my career as a female techie was an upstream swim. I always felt like I was w*rking twice as hard for half the credit. There were a few guys went out of their way to try to help me out, and some good came out of that. A drop or two of good water into a much larger bucket of BS.

I took my position as a laboratory manager and contracts manager very seriously. Nobody every got hurt by lasers or signal generation equipment. I ran the contracts straight and true.

I got to mentor a few summer interns. They left with practical techie skills and knowledge of how to plan and execute experiments.

Last but not least, I was awarded 2 US patents. Nothing ever came out of them, but no amount of professional jealousy and cut throat internal politics kept that from happening.
I FIREd within 6 months of the 2nd patent issue.

 

[Fishingmn]

I achieved my career goal of always maintaining my position on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. That said, I was fully involved with my children's lives growing up and have been married for 29 years (almost all of them happy). That and we saved enough along the way to retire next year at 54/53 (DW).

 

[Gumby]

I don't know about proud, but I'm happiest that I never actually had to do what the Navy trained me to do. If I had, none of us would be having this conversation today.

 

[rodi]

Being the only female engineer at my first two employers. Encouraging other women to go into the field.

That and writing embedded software that is in a huge number of cable/fios boxes in homes... It's kind of cool to go to someone's house, see their cable box and know I worked on it.

 

[kaneohe]

That's a nice article you linked, tucker. Thanks for sharing it.

Agree. Thanks.

 

[skipro33]

I am proud to have served in the military. I had the proud honor of being selected to crew on the flight bringing home POW's from Vietnam. I will never forget these men were amazed that we now had an all volunteer military.

 

[prose3589]

Saved an innocent kid from spending his life in prison. Still working... but I won't top that again.


Sent from my iPhone using Early Retirement Forum

 

[scrabbler1]

I worked for 23 years in the actuarial field, specializing in personal auto insurance. Having the combination of actuarial knowledge and mainframe computer programming skills made me very valuable in an actuarial division ("big fish, small pond") in the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. This gave me the leverage to ask for and get things others were not able to get, mainly the ability to request working LESS (this happened twice in my 7 part-time years) and easy my way into semi-retirement and lessen the awful, sickening commute.


This combination of skills made me the division's "Answer Man" to all kinds of questions and data requests from both inside my division and outside my division. And once I got promoted to supervisor in 1993, I gained the power (not a lot of power, just enough) to take control over more of my projects. This "Answer Man" status led to finding some important answers to data mysteries on one large project back in 2000 when, in the span of just a few weeks I solved two mysteries and immediately won a special award. Then again, I was becoming so depressed at the same time because of my company's relocation (making the commute even worse) I barely smiled when I got the award. However, the award added to my growing leverage to demand a switch to part-time work.


I recall hearing a story when my first supervisor got promoted to a VP of another department years later and asked her new staff, "Do we have a <my name> person here?" referring to someone experienced who had my combination of actuarial and computer programming skills. I thought that was a nice recognition of my value to the company.

 

[aja8888]

(This) Boy from a very poor family gets himself through college and does well in industry. Now looking back on all the different jobs and companies, I'm glad it's over. At the end, I ran my own S Corp for 12 years and did all the CPA work as well.

For an engineer, somehow managed to be a good writer, even though English was not my first language. My golf game has gone to hell though.