I started my working life as an apprentice electronics technician in a research and development department of an electronics company. After college and engineering training, there was lots of building of prototypes and test jigs and designing little digital circuits.
I then wandered into software for a bit, although there was a lot of interfacing with chips directly, with software, so my electronics background helped, there.
Then became a systems engineer, which combines electronics and software. This electronics wasn’t so much component level electronics, more board & device level. Choosing chunks of equipment, and getting it to work together. This was for crane automation. The computing chunks were STE boards: a processor board, then other boards for memory, communications and digital I/O. Sensor chunks were proximity detectors, encoders, tags and ultrasonic distance measurement kit, all for position determination. Communications chunks were radio data modules. This job took me round a bit of the world: Spain, Netherlands, Italy, USA.
Next it was road tunnels, controlling ventilation and lighting. The computers were the same STE kit, but some of the sensors were new to me: CO2 & NO sensors, to work out when to switch fans on, and light sensors to work out how many lights to put on in the tunnel.
At that same company, I also started doing Fire Brigade equipment: Computers that received messages, at fire stations, set off alarms that a call had come in, and printing out the address. Lots of communications, again, via PSTN, ISDN & leased line.
After that, I wandered to Spain, for a few years, and worked on developing a satellite ground station for EGNOS, but that was all software related.
I then returned to the UK, and went back to the Fire Brigade stuff, for a while, then went into some Aerospace stuff, and then became a photographer. And we’re all up to date.