Industrial Physics Career Perspective - 27 years in Silicon Valley

What’s it like for a physicist to work in the private sector? In this session I will share my industrial physics experiences during 27 years in Silicon Valley. I'll include the kinds of jobs I had, job titles, responsibilities, and differences between being an individual contributor vs a manager. Time permitting, I'll also say a little about the technologies I worked on.

I earned my PhD in low temperature physics at UCSD in 1984. After a postdoc, my first job was at IBM in San Jose doing experiments on next generation technology for hard disk drives. That’s the old-fashioned kind with actual spinning disks. I continued that focus during most of my career, although sometimes I was very involved in product development and troubleshooting. I changed companies seven times including three times when my previous company was acquired. Most days I enjoyed my work, and I welcome this opportunity to share that with those who might be considering this career path. Questions will be welcome!