EF Data
1996 - 1997
Member of the Technical Staff
Thankfully, one of the engineers I worked with at Acoustic Imaging had a number of contacts at other engineering companies and put me in touch with someone at EF Data (now a part of Comtech). EF Data had two product lines: digital modems and satellite ground station microwave equipment. The only opening they had was for someone to work as a manufacturing support engineer for their microwave equipment product lines, which was similar to the task I did not enjoy very much at Motorola, but because my wife was pregnant and we needed medical insurance immediately, I took the job.
I really only did one thing at EF Data: fix problems on the manufacturing lines, which often required working 2nd shift hours when much of the production was done or when I could get time with the production line technicians to test design modifications.
The reason I left this job...
I have friends who are engineers that worked, or still work, for this company, and their experiences with the company have been generally good. For me personally, I found this company to be a difficult working environment. The different engineering groups were quite 'cliquey', and in particular it was difficult for me as a manufacturing engineer to get the design engineers to talk to me, which was a problem because they had to approve any design changes to fix problems. I did manage to fix a number of problems in the 1 year I worked there, and to streamline their production processes, but I could tell right away that this would not be a good fit for my abilities, so I left as soon as our child was born and healthy and I had developed other company contacts.