Big Fish, Little Pond

[kevinthenerd]

I haven't been on Anandtech for some time because I drifted away from computing in general. I majored in Mechanical Engineering (Energy Systems) at UCF, and I went off to work for an aftermarket distributor of industrial parts as a reverse engineer and applications engineer. A few months into the job, I got fed up with the amount of redundant data entry and wrote AutoHotKey scripts to speed things up. Everyone was impressed, but I knew it was trivial compared to what could have been done.

Today, after three and a half years with the company, I do primarily computer work as an unofficial IT guy. They call me a "technical information specialist" in addition to my "product engineer" title. For example, when they need a large set of parts set up or updated, they send the list to me because our underfunded, overworked IT department simply doesn't have the time to handle day-to-day tasks. My biggest project right now is to figure out how to keep our webstore synchronized with our main business system. (My experience doing engineering for the company allows me to have a very clear idea of the requirements up front.) The work I do impresses them, but I believe they're easily impressed, and they're not aware of the big world of IT out there. On a daily basis, I work with DOS batch files, VBS, VBA (Excel, Access, ADO), Oracle PL/SQL, MySQL, PHP, our Oracle application (IFS) and our webstore application (X-Cart).

My wife and I want to sell our house (or rent it) and move away from Spring Hill FL (a Tampa Bay exurb) and into a metropolitan area such as Portland. I can't decide whether to market myself as purely a "mechanical engineer" with all the pigeon-holing that goes with that, as an IT guy with a basically untested and unmeasured set of highly specialized skills, or as a quasi-ME/quasi-IT guy (a bit like John Walker in his earlier days) to mirror the skill set I'm building now.

1. How do I handle this "big fish little pond" problem? Is there a "practice test" of sorts to see how my skills match up to those of a full-time IT guy?
2. Is there a market for a mechanical engineer/programmer?
3. What's the job market like in Portland?

 

[kevinthenerd]

I've been looking at job postings. The most common qualification I'm missing seems to be Java.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Then tell the bosses you MUST write some stuff in java; to remain secure and efficient you know...

Also, why I clicked on the title, I misread and thought:

 

[kevinthenerd]

Here's my problem. When I tell a potential employer that "I know XYZ" to a particular degree (like novice, intermediate, advanced, level II, etc.), I want to know that my definition of a medium steak matches their definition of a medium steak. In mechanical engineering, I have an NCEES-accredited degree and pretty-much know what they're looking for, but if I branch out into the IT world, I'm in the dark. I don't want to travel across the country only to be fired for incompetence or be overqualified and underpaid. Can anyone point me to a syllabus, diagnostic test, or a checklist of things someone should know at a particular skill level for the skills I mentioned? (Is there even such a "standard" in the IT industry?)

 

[FoBoT]

been there, am there

getting into a 'niche' makes for difficult career hopping

you might just have to start over, look more at jobs that interest you and worry less about what the employer wants. then you'll just have to perform well in the interview and convince them to give you a shot, insist that you are a fast learner/high performer etc etc

good luck