Summary

This episode we discuss Jason’s journey as an engineer, from his childhood interests to his current role at Ignys.

Jason recounted his early fascination with taking apart toys and his experiences in design technology at school, where he learned to make printed circuit boards.

Despite initially considering a career in law, Jason’s passion for practical subjects led him to pursue engineering at university. He described his transition from aeronautical engineering to electronics, highlighting the importance of mentorship and practical experience in his career development.

The interview also covered Jason’s experiences as a manager, the challenges he faced balancing technical work with managerial responsibilities, and his eventual decision to leave a stressful position.

Jason emphasized the importance of finding a balance between technical work and management and expressed his preference for hands-on engineering combined with mentorship roles.

The conversation touched on the ethical considerations in engineering, with Jason highlighting Ignys’ commitment to not creating products that harm people. Throughout the interview, Jason stressed the importance of practical experience, continuous learning, and finding joy in engineering work.

 

Transcript

Neale 00:00

Welcome to Another Bright Spark, a podcast by Ignys, where we interview really interesting people. Today’s guest, it’s Jason.

 

Neale 00:08

What I’m really interested in is what makes you tick as an engineer. So could you talk to me a little bit about your sort of childhood school was engineering something you always wanted to get into? What was the initial path?

 

Jason 00:20

Yeah, I think I’ve always been an engineer at heart. As a child, I always took apart all my toys, whether they were working or broken.  If they were broken, I tried to fix them. I think when I was younger, I mostly failed. I ended up with things in bits. I give them to my dad, and then dad would have to try and fix them. And sometimes surreptitiously just go and buy a new one.M A lot of the time, I wanted the toys that were kind of the assembly toys, I had my Meccano my Lego, and things like that. But as I went on, I did DT at school, design technology, systems, and controls.  So we did basic electronics.  We were allowed to make our own printed circuit boards, which in hindsight was really dangerous.

 

Neale 01:06

Was it with the acid bath?

 

Jason 01:06

Yeah, you’ve got an acid bath, and you’ve got an alkaline bath for the developer. You’re heating both materials. You’ve got the bandsaw for the FR4, you’ve got all these chemicals, you’ve got all this stuff going on, using very bright UV light sources for exposure.

 

Jason 01:25

Really, really dangerous. But because I think I went to a bit of a laissez -faire school, they just let us have at it. And so I used to make my own kind of hobby electronics, make my own PCBs, and they weren’t super advanced. I didn’t know what I was doing in the modern context, but I was good enough to wire up a circuit and kind of make little microcontroller boards and stuff. This is also, not that I’m old, old, but this is from like the PIC days.  So Arduinos didn’t exist. The most advanced language I learned was PIC Basic. There was a company called PICACS that made in -circuit programmable PICs, and so they were great for being a hobbyist. So yeah, so I really enjoyed that side of things, design technology, making my own things.  But I didn’t actually want to be an engineer. I was originally going to be a barrister.

 

Neale 02:16

That was the dream?

 

Jason 02:18

Well, in hindsight, it wasn’t so much that it was a dream, it was, I think, received wisdom, like my dad was always like, oh, law, go into law, a very good profession, you know, my sister was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, you know, these are classic family tropes. Yeah, family -led career progression, you know, this will be good, it will set you up for life, good respectable profession.  I think also, certainly from dad’s perspective, I would have been a good barrister because I’ve got the good argumentative style, you know, and I can carry myself in a conversation. But when it came to selecting my A levels, I picked to do maths, physics, design, technology, and an AS level in German. And the chief master of the school called me into his office to say, I appreciate that the universities just require three A’s for law, they don’t actually specify which subjects it needs to be, but you can’t do these subjects, you need to do politics, philosophy, English language,

 

Jason 03:12

something like that. And I sat in his office and I had a weird little moment of, no, I want to do these subjects, I want to carry on doing mathsy things and physicsy things for the rest of my life. And I don’t want to stop doing DT, it’s great, it’s so much fun. And so I kind of sat and I had a little moment in the office, and I just turned around to him and said, well, no, this is, you know, I’m applying to the universities, I’m applying to, I’ve picked the subjects I’ve picked, kind of have it, you know, what choice does he have in what A levels I’ve chosen.

 

Neale 03:47

It’s almost like a movie moment, you can see the light sort of coming in….

 

Jason 03:51

And it was later on on reflection based on that that I was like This means when I do go and be a barrister. I am gonna have to drop all this stuff And I’m not gonna get to do the things So I would like to be an engineer of some description and I had no idea how to go about that or what to do I spoke to my DT teacher at the time.

 

Jason 04:13

Mr. Howard and Spoke to him about the where I should apply what’s good And he pointed out that, you know, engineering is a very broad church If you apply to Cambridge, they just do flat engineering and then you specialize later if you want to go into a Specialism if you want to do aerospace There’s only select universities that you can go to that will do that or if you want to do, you know chemical engineering maybe you need chemistry which I didn’t have and So I needed to choose what I liked was electronics And at the time I wanted to go into something really high -tech really interesting I had a little bit of an interest in model aircraft and I thought I could go into kind of avionics and control systems and Applied to do aerospace design or aeronautical engineering depending on which which university called it what they call it and then I was accepted to Loughborough and for aeronautical engineering And their aero school had a really nice program where in the first year you did a variety of modules with mechanical design electro technology they called it and electronics Technical drawing aerodynamics Materials,

 

Jason 05:32

you know really nice kind of broad program but then My plan was to then specialize in the later years and do more of the electronics and more of the mechatronics stuff And but then the course program sort of changed a bit and we weren’t able to do the out of department modules That I would have liked to have done.  Okay, so I stopped and went Mmm, I am just gonna do the full electronics course. And so I did a new first year all over again And join the electronics program as part of their electrical engineering Department and that turned out to be a brilliant idea because that course was just vastly more electronics based obviously and I Was able to specialize in that as well They had if they have a few like paths and you can go more computer science see or more embedded And I picked a path that used FPGA and communications devices And so I’ve got lots of digital comms microwave comms as well as configurable logic and really interesting programmable things So,

 

Jason 06:35

Yeah, so I took that kind of that route through University and came out.  I did the program. So I’m a master of engineering. It’s much much smaller than the universe. Yeah, master of the electrons…  So yeah during during my final year I worked on a quadrotor aircraft that was built around as like a Linux based single -board computer I was building all the electronics to go on top of that to do, you know, the avionics ebits Gyros and little comms module and that was great It was very low -tech… But when I went to my grad job and all of a sudden I’ve got all this exposure to this amazing computational power But also really fine -pitched really high quality high detail work and very very expensive parts I then tried to pick up my hobby projects again I’m gonna go back and I couldn’t go back because I can put down a I could put down a pic or I can buy an Arduino,

 

Jason 07:32

but it’s it’s so underpowered by comparison or the things I’ve done at work I’ve shown me what could be possible what I could be doing I wanted to be building an interesting radio system cut with a custom radio to go on it and I couldn’t afford either the technology itself You know come, come and buy a three and a half thousand dollar FPGA and stick it down as much as I would want to And also the engineering process is you know, a 16 layer PCB is beyond me, you know, I Was quite happy as a hobbyist making you know a four layer board I could probably sit there and make a stack up for a much thicker board, but I haven’t learned that I’ve not that as an actual skill and it’s something I want proper training for before I did because You know the the net list becomes so complex that a small mistake and you’ve ruined your now $4 ,000 board And but yeah,

 

Jason 08:26

So my my work as a my work as a professional and or my exposure to the professional equipment and Stop, okay to the hobbyist stop me being able to be a hobbyist from a Like I want to perspective. It’s really quite strange.  That’s very interesting

 

Neale 08:44

Just to loop back to school. So both you and I went to private school, private educators. So I think we had a sort of similar experience there because I also had interest and choice in A levels.  And to me, it sounds like you, and I would say broke the mold, but you fought upstream to sort of follow the career that you did. Do you think your career now would have benefited from a more sort of practical background in a different situation? Or do you think the education that you got sort of led you to where you are? Would you ever think about those sort of two things?

 

Jason 09:18

I think primarily the reason I am where I am is because I want to do practical things. And so whenever the opportunities are risen to build something rather than to do an analysis, I’ve wanted to get stuck in and make the thing.  I always wanted to do the practical things. I even at Loughborough where there was a reasonable amount of practical work in terms of labs, I always thought there wasn’t as much practical work as I would have liked. Again, that’s a practicality.  In a university setting, you can’t do everything with real equipment and the time constraints and resourcing constraints mean a lot of it’s got to be paper -based. And you’ve got to fit a lot into a degree without running labs all the time. So I think the right student will pick their own path through the practical things and come out with a practical bent. The more academic students often did very well in their degree but lacked the practical side.

 

Jason 10:23

So I don’t think the route through education really is the key to it. I think if there’s part of the education that matters, it’s the individual stuff. It’s the fact that my teachers at school, Mr.  Walker and Mr. Howard, who very much saw that I really enjoyed it and fostered what I wanted to do and gave me the permission to make my own printed circuit boards after hours. Using tubs of acid.  Using tubs of acid, exactly.

 

Neale 10:53

They had an alkaline one there as well, so surely they bounce each other out….

 

Jason 10:56

At one point someone left one of the acid baths on late at night and one boiled over and there was an acid explosion in the DT lab. Fantastic. So yeah we came into school one morning and there were fire engines. Do we know which boy left the acid bath?  No I don’t think so. I don’t think it was ever quite worked out but my portfolio for my air level DT smelled spicy for the rest of the year and they had to throw a lot of stuff away because a cloud of acid vapor had engulfed the room. It was not fun.

 

Neale 11:27

So, would an apprenticeship route learn on the job have made a difference?

 

Jason 11:35

I feel like certainly my graduate job was a lot of learning on the job. The alternative would have been to not go to university and go straight into a career as a technician, junior engineer type post.

 

Neale 11:51

Which is a common route.

 

Jason 11:52

Which is a very common route, but the specific job I picked up where I needed to do a certain amount of radio technology, bits of signal processing, and was working in FPGA design is something that I had not been exposed to at all before university. And so I don’t think I would have had access to that technology as a technical student or as an apprentice, particularly when I was 18, 19. For me I think the university education is an exercise in learning how to learn, and they teach you how to research and how to find the information, but from a practical sense the first maybe three months of my graduate job taught me more practical knowledge than I think my degree did, but I don’t think I would have been able to learn it without the degree. So I can’t say, in the interest of good science, I’ve only taken one part, I can’t give you a clean answer, but I think I would have been okay in an apprenticeship.

 

Jason 13:00

I think, again, if it was good, it would have been good because of the mentors. And similarly, my grad job, I had some great mentors. So I think if the people are good, and they give you the tutelage that you need and the support that you need and the areas that you’re needing to learn, then I think anyone can succeed that way.

 

Neale 13:22

So, here at Ignys, one of our senior engineers. You don’t directly line manage any of the engineers.  I know you’ve done that in the past, in previous places. A couple of questions I want to ask is, your own workload. So, when you’re an engineer, you’re a manager of engineers, you still have your own engineering or problems to solve. So, how do you sort of balance that?  But as well as that, you’ve also got the pressure from sort of director levels who need results and projects and that kind of stuff. But then you’ve got the pull of your own team as well. I always think of it as like a double, like you’re being squished in the middle. It’s like pressure from above, but your team have got their own needs. They’ve got their own wants.

 

Jason 14:05

Yeah, it’s a difficult balance.  It’s a balance that I’ve not always got right. And certainly in my, in my old job, I, I was a senior engineer for a while, and I was doing a lot of the mentoring and help. And I’d gained oversight of a number of systems sort of by accident or by stealth. You know, we had an overseas IT team.  And I did all the IT in the UK that needed a hands. Not, not as an official role, but just as a message on teams, the service down, can you log in and sort that out for us that image up this new laptop. And but you end up with extra obligations.  And some of the things aren’t really an authority, they’re just job you need to do, but things you’re not in charge of. Similarly, looking after project plans, you know, I was never a project manager.

 

Jason 14:58

But as you become more senior, you become more responsible for the timescales, and particularly when the timescales get missed. And I managed to run that balance, okay, when I was running my own workload, because if an engineer needed help, and I was way behind on my own things, it was acceptable for me to say, I’m really sorry, I’d like to help, but I need to get this release out or do the thing, you know, particularly if I’m sat trying to debug something in the thermal chamber, and I’m a bit spoopy in the brain, you know, maybe it’s a good idea to actually stop and go and help someone, but then I’ll end up more behind. And so that that was a balance, I think I could manage when I had just my own workload. And then as, as part of, I guess, just general time, you know, my, my, my old manager retired, and he was the engineering director.

 

Jason 15:50

And so two of us got sort of promoted. And my one colleague became in charge of the hardware. And I became the software firmware and testing lead. And so this big umbrella, you know, and I was a judge. Yeah, I was officially a firmware engineer, because I was writing all the FPGA code.  And my team members were software engineers writing all the sort of embedded Linux and further embedded, you know, DSP code.  And we had a test engineer who was responsible for our factory test and validation, continuous integration system and all of that. And all of a sudden, I then became the sort of department head in charge of all those things, but also sitting alongside everyone as another engineer. And my engineering workload didn’t go down to, you know, compensate for the additional overhead of having to manage a team.

 

Neale 16:42

That needed help “now”.

 

Jason 16:44

Yeah that the obligation then became part of my job description It then became an interesting problem of yes, you know, this engineer has a problem They have turned to their line manager for support Yes, their line manager has got work to do unfortunately, everyone else’s problems come first and For me, I think I am a bad manager A number of people have said they think I’m a good manager for the people I’m managing Because I look after them and I try and I shield them from the problems on high. I try to Make sure that everyone has their needs addressed and you know, they’re unblocked And I will attempt to fight for you know fair pay and things like this But where I didn’t have the power to actually make those things happen.

 

Jason 17:34

All I did was really take on lots of extra stress for myself And so I ended up a Stressy little ball of mess and working far far too many hours to try and keep up with everything I was doing And I ended up having a little bit of a nervous breakdown over some nonsense with an Excel spreadsheet In in that way, yeah, tiny little things make us go mad. Absolutely And I yeah, I was I was sat at home.  It was it was in the it was after Covid had happened And so we’d been running like a remote office, but because I lived closest to the office I was administrating all the equipment in the office another job. Yeah, I’d have people ring me up and say oh this system’s down Can you go fix it? And drop everything you jump in the car go fix the thing wash your hands

 

Neale 18:23

Did you ask for, I mean could you even ask for any help at this point, or was it more of a case of you couldn’t see the wood?

 

Jason 18:30

I think I wanted help at that point. I think at that point everything felt sort of okay. I didn’t realize quite how stressed I was and then it was some months into you know maybe a year into sort of Covid things. It all sort of came to a head where I think we’d been working on a project.  Timescales were tight as always.  A number of things had happened to slip the project. I’d been announcing my deadlines you know what my my forecast of when I thought we’d be ready and I was constantly told that it wasn’t good enough. You know needs to be sooner and I found that very difficult because I was confident in my own deadlines. Every time I’d tried to reassess time I’d come with the same numbers but I was still trying to work to the thing that I’d been asked for. The aspiration I’d been given and that basically meant trying to work as fast as possible which I think is slower.  You know if you try and go too fast you end up making mistakes. So yeah I ended up as a stressy little ball.

 

Jason 19:34

I was sat in my spinny chair at home crying and my other half said you know let’s go for a walk. I think you need to be signed off with stress and I’ve never been signed off with stress.  I barely even have sick days. I’m usually not sick. And I found myself sat there thinking if I get signed off with stress when I come back I have to deal with all the mess that’s been caused by the fact that I haven’t been there for six weeks. Which you just didn’t Tim.  Well yeah I caught myself in that reasoning thinking if that’s the case I should just leave and so yeah it become an untenable position for me and a very unhealthy one.

 

Neale 20:22

Very brave to decide that.

 

Jason 20:24

Well, what I did was I handed in my notice with nowhere to go, partly because I’m very fortunate and, you know, I’ve got savings, I had the ability to take a couple of months off without really worrying too much about the mortgage for, you know, two months. And so I made a commitment that it was early September when I was going to finish.  I made a commitment that for the entire month of October I wasn’t going to look for a job. And yeah, and so I spent a bit of time, got my old helicopter back out, although with a new FPGA based dev card, because now all that stuff has become the hobbyist stuff. And so all the technology that I lusted over in 2005 that was state of the art, thousands and thousands of pounds, I’ve now got a hundred pound board at home. It’s got all that stuff on it.  And the tools are, the tools are still terrible.

 

Jason 21:22

The tools are a lot better. Yeah, they’re still terrible. They’re like 200 gigabytes.  It’s ridiculous.  But everything is much better supported. And I all of a sudden had fun again. And I went back to being a hobbyist for a good six weeks. Refund the passion.  Yeah.  And just playing around with it, really enjoying it. And then we got to the first of November and I opened a LinkedIn because I hadn’t had, I didn’t see the point. I hadn’t had a LinkedIn until that point. And I was beset with recruiters. I think I must have taken a very regular engineering approach of I wrote down all my requirements as a document. I sent them alongside my CV.  And it had things like I don’t want to travel more than half an hour from home. This is where I live. And so some of them would send me things and be like, Oh, here’s a job in Cheshire. And I go, how far is Cheshire? And then it’s more than half an hour.  No, no, no.  And strange that.

 

Neale 22:24

I love that, a requirement section for job hunting.

 

Jason 22:27

Well, yeah, because… Why not?

 

Jason 22:29

Why should I have to sift through things which are against an obvious list when I can hand that list to the recruiter and say, if it doesn’t meet all the things on this list, they send it to me. I did the same when I bought a house and sent that to estate agents. Similarly, they kept sending me things that weren’t on the list.

 

Neale 22:48

You do that in other areas of life, don’t you? This is the requirement, so therefore…

 

Jason 22:52

Exactly. So yeah, I think the requirements side of things fits quite well with the engineering job.  But yes, I spoke to a few different companies. I had actually had an offer on the same day as I got my offer from Ignys, where I’d been to see like a defence contractor doing very interesting looking radar -based FPGA things for the noses of Eurofighters. And the other thing that I think milled around in my brain was that I’d come from my interview at Ignys. And one of the things I’d found really interesting was that Stephen, who interviewed me, had said one of Ignys’ core values is that we don’t make things that hurt people. You know, we’ll actively turn down projects that are for weapons or for weapons -adjacent things.  And I mean, since I’ve been here, I’ve seen that we genuinely do.  It’s not just a value, it’s a thing that we do.

 

Jason 23:55

I’ve been involved in the decision to turn down paid work, good paying work. And that was really nice.  And it just stood out to me as something, here’s a company that’s not just a mindless shareholder stock profit -driven thing. You know, they actually have some values and they’re willing to stand by them. And obviously at the time, how willing they were to stand by them? Well, I didn’t know.I thought it was a differentiator to it was a differentiatoraother job is making weapons and had a long chat with my partner about the concept of making things that hurt people and became more comfortable with the general rule of yeah I don’t want to make things that hurt people and yeah so I then had an offer from Ignys and I had my offer from this other company and had the recruiter ringing me up trying to offer me more and more money and he just seemed perplexed I just said no I’m all right thanks I’m gonna go and take this other one yeah and that was that was November a couple of years ago

 

Neale 25:03

And here we are on the Bright Spark podcast.

 

Jason 25:05

Here we are on Ignys’ own podcast.

 

Neale 25:08

Progression is something that’s very sort of natural people go from engineer to maybe a supervisor role to manager director you seem someone who’s very happy to be at the coal face is that where you’re sort of naturally happy is that

 

Jason 25:28

Yeah, I like to help. I like to do. I think if I had a purely oversight position, I would end up interfering and trying to micromanage because I want to be doing. I certainly found that when I was a mixture of a manager and an engineer, I didn’t want to do the managing.  Like the funds are what they are. And if I have to tell someone that they can’t have a pay rise because we’ve not got the money, even though they’ve done a really good job, I find that hard. And so I don’t want to do those things because I don’t enjoy them.  The bit of my job I really enjoy is working with technology, working with problems and solving problems. And I enjoy my mentorship.  I really enjoy watching other people learn.

 

Jason 26:24

And so what I want for my long term is a mixture of the two. I want to always have a technical job on hand, where I’m working on developing something or building something or solving a problem. But at the same time, I want to be available as a resource to the office to help out with hopefully what is a decent amount of knowledge from the past about weird and wonderful bits of, you know, the electronics today.

 

Neale 26:50

You’re a maker, even as a kid you were taking things apart, trying to make them work, hobbyist engineer, senior engineer, sort of, you know, mentoring now. So your brain must be always problem solving and thinking about things.  Is it hard to take, leave work, go home and not think about a bit of code or how you can solve a certain problem?

 

Jason 27:12

Yeah I split my time kind of weirdly you know my free time I do archery as a hobby and particularly in the summer practice sessions are in the afternoon you know when we’ve got the sunshine and so I might leave work at three go shoot for a few hours and then finish up my hours at home and so when I’ve got a problem I need to solve that can be a really nice break and you’re right I can’t turn it off and I’ll leave work I’ll be in the car I’ll be driving in in the morning I’ll be thinking about the problem I’ve got at hand how to fix it but I think what I’ve learned over time is not to worry about trying to turn it off but trying to let the bits of background task in my brain solve problems for me it’s not about whether it’s difficult to turn off it’s about whether you can take the fact that you’re always on and use it to your advantage and tailor it to how your world works

 

Neale 28:12

And that doesn’t sound like a problem for you because a lot of people there’s no right or wrong answer here But a lot of people will clock in at eight Finish a four or whatever time that is and they’ll just sort of switch off works in a box But my life is outside of that And I think that kind of potentially defines a a job as maybe a vocation or a calling It would sound too pretentious about it

 

Jason 28:36

It does sound quite pretentious.

 

Neale 28:37

sound quite pretentious but you are the master engineer of Electron.

 

Jason 28:42

Yeah. And I think there has to be something said for always thinking about what you do in your spare time. But at the same time, there’s very much a place for turning off.  Yeah. I envy those who can walk out of work and not worry about it until they come back in. Yeah, I, I wonder if that would be nice.  I’ve never experienced it.  So I can’t, I can’t say what it’s like. When things are not going well, it’s horrible, because you’re trying to hack away at some insoluble problem in your mind, which you can’t solve in your mind, because, you know, you have a physical problem on a circuit that you need to test something or change something, no amount of thinking about it is going to help.

 

Neale 29:26

It’s almost like a pollutant at that point, isn’t it? Yes, yay.

 

Jason 29:29

it’s just spinning around and it’s very difficult to get rid of. For that sort of thing you need your mechanisms to get your brain into a different space. You go for a run, you put the loud music in your ears and you just kind of drown it out. I think on balance it’s a benefit but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its downsides.

 

Neale 29:50

As an engineer, you problem -solve all the time. Are you ever truly happy with a solution?

 

Jason 29:57

There are some solutions which are wonderful. I think my philosophy has always been make it work, make it fast, make it elegant. There’s a real place for just making it work and getting on with your life. And there are, you know, some things you write a little script or something, it does a job and it does that job very well and you just leave it alone. And there are other things that you sit and polish.  I think there have been particularly optimization jobs where you’re trying to make something smaller. So like in the context of an FPGA, you want to use less and less of the chip to do a job or get it done faster. And there are some things I’ve built in the past where I’ve looked at it and thought, I don’t think this can be better.  This is done.  And that’s wonderful.  That’s very rare. It’s very rare to actually get to a point where you think something can’t be improved upon.

 

Jason 30:51

But in engineering, what we actually need is a good definition of done. Quite often the customer will have a requirement and the requirement is always vaguer than the implementation. We need some definition to say it’s acceptable when we get here and we can stop.  It doesn’t mean that it’s finished in terms of it being the best it will ever be or it being optimal. It needs to be good enough. Because once it’s met all of the requirements, we are done. That doesn’t mean to say we couldn’t come back and make it better.

 

Neale 31:29

We must know a little bit

 

Jason 31:31

I think it would, nor if we didn’t then go and work on something else. I think the fact that we’re constantly moving from job to job or product to product, interesting technology to other weird and wonderful things, means that the urge to constantly improve things is satiated by the new things that come in and the things that turn up as a basket case and need a lot of work to make them actually work at all. And at a certain point you start not so much cutting your losses but realising where the efficiency of your time is spent.  I could spend another 40 hours making this a percent faster or I could spend an hour making this other thing twice as fast. There is a sanity in not chasing after the last little bit.