Dustin Johnson, Software Engineer + Chief Software Architect
Dustin Johnson, Founding Partner + Chief Software Architect
In this episode, Katherine speaks with Dustin Johnson, a software engineer and fellow digital nomad, once in 2017 and again in 2021 about his journey to becoming a founding partner of Seeq Corporation.
Dustin got interested in computers at a young age, he loved the problem solving nature of programming. After winning a high school science competition, Dustin was awarded an internship at The Space and Missiles Systems Center on the LA air force base, where he worked as a software engineer for over 2 years.
Unlike most of his peers in the field, Dustin didn’t end up completing his Bachelor’s degree. He shares that while he was in school at UC Riverside he was given the opportunity to work at Case Technologies at UC Davis. He ultimately decided to put his formal education on hold while he worked with Case Technologies to create the protocol analyzer for the Boeing 77.
After leaving Case Technologies, Dustin spent over 4 years engineering drones at Insitu. He discusses some of the basics of drone anatomy and engineering, as well as the highly competitive processes of winning government contracts. Dustin is now a founding partner and Chief Architect for Seeq Corporations, a remote-only software company specializing in manufacturing analytics.
Dustin Johnson
Dustin Johnson is a Founding Partner and the Chief Architect of Seeq Corporation, a remote only software company specializing in manufacturing analytics. While at Seeq, Dustin has overseen the technical vision and architecture as the company has grown from its 6 founders to the >150 employees it has now. He also had the pleasure of traveling the world with an amazing bunch of raggedy misfits in 2016 as part of Remote Year's Battuta crew.
Show Notes
Career
Intern Software Engineer, The Aerospace Corporation (2003-2005)
Software Engineer, CACE Technologies (2005-2008)
Senior Software Engineer, Software Technologies Group (2008-2009)
Principle Software Engineer and Chief Engineer, Insitu, Inc. (2009-2013)
Founding Partner and Chief Architect, Seeq Corporation (2013-present)
Dustin & Katherine’s Takeaways:
Your degree — or lack thereof — doesn’t necessarily determine how well you’ll perform in a given field.
“Some of the best people that I’ve ever worked with in my field, in software, are not software engineers — like their degree does not say software engineer. They’re mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. I do think schooling helps, of course… But in software, it has been my experience that often times the best in the industry don’t necessarily have a degree in software.”
Our childhood interests and passions can heavily influence our future career path.
“[As a kid] I’d go online and download a bunch of source code from this website, and there were all these little projects that people had uploaded, and I would go download a bunch of them to a floppy disk… and then I’d go to my computer and for like a week I’d dissect these programs and try to figure out how they worked, [until] I hit a wall and couldn’t figure out anymore and ran out of programs.”
Your work doesn’t have to be the thing you love doing the most; sometimes doing something you’re really good at can be fulfilling.
“I do a lot of things, but I’m not good at many things. But I am good at software engineering. I wouldn’t say that I do software engineering because I enjoy it — I do enjoy it. I can think of things that I enjoy more, but I do it primarily because I’m really good at it and I like being good at things, so in turn I like it.”
The Modern Work podcast is produced by Conaway Creative. The team behind this episode:
Hosted & directed by Katherine Conaway
Editing & sound by Charlotte Oakley
Social media by Kelly Becker
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