I worked a number of industry computing jobs starting at 14 years old. I worked at Apple, Palm, the Internet Systems Consortium, as well as a gov't lab (Lawrenc

I worked a number of industry computing jobs starting at 14 years old. I worked at Apple, Palm, the Internet Systems Consortium, as well as a gov't lab (Lawrence Livermore.) Lawrence livermore was cool but high performance computing didn't really grab me. ISC was very cool and dealt with super interesting problems but I don't think the software was exactly what I wanted to work on. Apple and Palm were neat but what I was working on felt like it lacked importance. Consumer electronics did not feel like it was endowing my life with meaning. So, I went for a physics PhD and now a postdoc and am pretty happy. I get to be pretty self directed and get to be the first to see a natural phenomenon and figure out how to probe it. This gives me a fulfillment that I couldn't find in industry. Maybe I'll go back to industry as a research scientist -- who knows.