I started my career as a hardware developer, working with discrete analog circuitry and communications busses for the first year or so. Then one day they decided to put a 16-bit CPU in the rack as a system controller. I was one of the absolutely most junior engineers in the department, but as all the engineers there were analog developers they just looked through our applications and discovered that I had studied some computer circuitry at university. Everyone (at least analog developers) knew that digital circuitry was like building lego - you just put the chips together. Two years later, after a few ups and downs, one of the senior engineers there told me he considered me to be one of the five top engineers in the department - a department of 100 engineers. I was flattered, but still wonder how much he had had to drink.

After three years at British Aerospace I decided it was time to move on, but wasn't quite ready to move back to Australia. A Swedish company advertised for engineers in the English papers, and I applied. I'd hadn't yet seen much of northern Europe despite three years in England, and thought a year with Stockholm as a base would be a good idea.