Engineering Job Future

Our Founder

Donald ("Don") Wilde has been a working engineer for over a quarter century, doing everything from microcontroller firmware programming to chip design and failure analysis.

A self-taught computer engineer, his sociology and psychology background alerted him to the coming crunch in the American engineering economy in the late 1990's, and he began to consider expanding out of the technical career space. In 1999, he founded Silver Lynx, his first business venture, doing everything from paid promotion of the FreeBSD operating system -- leading to the orchestration of a joint press release with the NetBSD team and Apple Computer at the release of Darwin -- to electronic and software patent prototypes involving many technologies. He also began assembling an offshore programming team of young Ukrainians.

That team helped him in the launch of his second concurrent venture, Network Lynx, a partnership with Michael Carrillo, a twenty year friend who was developing his own recruiting business. Using Michael's business models, Don worked with his Ukrainian team to architect CPGjoblist, a targeted job board and candidate magnet for the Consumer Packaged Goods marketing and sales field.

Don's passion for education got in the way of making money, and he was forced to re-enter the job market, taking a contract position at Sandia Labs. After two years there, he and his then-wife moved their family to Austin, Texas, where he found a position working at Dell in Round Rock. In his second year of working there, he was moved to a new position overseeing work done by contractors in India. He learned a great deal more about offshoring there, but the situation was not a win for either side, and Dell laid him off in March, 2009.

Vowing to make a success of himself in business this time around, Don invested a good portion of his severance package in education, and that has led to Engineering Job Future, a venture which his experience has made him uniquely suited to run.