[mysql]

There were a few reasons to switch. I was working in the automotive industry where building anything is a race to the bottom. "How much cheaper can we make this than our competitor" was how design decisions were usually made. Software was the bottom of this list as manufacturing doesn't see it as a profit driver and mostly as an expense. I was in a pickle because I loved the projects I was working on... Ultrasonics, Radar combined with some sort of actuator or motor. Lots of FFTs, debugging boards, soldering, learning Altium and a great boss but I was always pulling nails to get money for projects. I knew I wanted to work somewhere else where the product was software / electrical hardware and I was having a hard time finding the right fit.

After talking with some friends who do webdev (Node, Python) I learned JS in a couple of weeks and got hired into a consulting firm where I worked for 6 months building a document search engine in C# on top of ElasticSearch. I now lead a team at a small firm that builds specialized search applications for different parts of the internet.

I now know of places that have the software culture (and software money) that do embedded systems well but I love what I do now with no shortage of cool problems to work on. Not sure if I would go back into embedded but I still dabble with Arduino's and Pi's.