Meet Jeff Wurzbach: Electrical and systems engineer in the drone industry

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jeff Wurzbach and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeff, is there a quote or affirmation that’s meaningful to you?
Eisenhower is credited with saying “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” On a day-to-day basis, I operate with a simplified version of the above, “No plan survives contact with reality.” This reminds me to stop fixating on planning things to the nth degree when I have an open-ended problem that is not well defined. Doing a massively fancy and detailed plan for a poorly defined problem is rife with assumptions that can be partially to completely incorrect. 

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Sometime around middle school, I realized that I learn things much more effectively by doing them. I survived in classes that were based on book learning and thrived on classes with hands-on work. From my sophomore year of high school and on, I got involved doing things that applied the materials I was learning about in school. This meant when I wanted to get better at interpersonal communication in the early part of engineering school, I took a job working at an IT help desk. When I wanted to learn how to build electronics, I found projects that let me build electronics and did them. In the process of doing the board level electronics projects, I took a leadership role in what became one of the largest student organizations at UC San Diego—IEEE UCSD. From there I got an internship at General Atomics. I worked in the systems engineering group, manufacturing group, and finally in an R&D group. I thought I had it made. The R&D group I was in was a literal dream job. Then the government shutdown in 2013 happened right as I completed my engineering degree and was looking to convert to a full-time position. But, I graduated into a hiring freeze. So I had to find another path. I was rather displeased. I polished up the resume and went to DECaF (a career fair for engineering students at UC San Diego) and shopped my resume around. I had a bunch of interviews and ultimately had 4 offers from various places. I accepted an offer from a startup company called 3D Robotics (3DR) designing electronics for consumer and commercial drones. 3DR was an absolutely unforgettable and wild ride. Products I’d designed, built, and tested were on the shelf at national retailers. Unfortunately, that ride ultimately ended for me in October 2015 when the San Diego office closure started. What felt like 10 years of experience were packed into about 3 years. It was crazy. I took about a month off to consider what I wanted to do with the next step in my career and recover a bit from the constant go, go, go of start-up life. I took on some contract work to get some cash flowing in and 5 years later I am still doing contract work, but also working on my own products that help solve constant sources of headaches in the successful deployment of systems I’ve designed in my freelance/contract jobs. I’ve worked on nearly every aspect of a product’s lifecycle, from ideation, through design, prototyping, new product introduction, mass manufacturing, and end of life. In doing so I’ve faced a lot of challenges. One day it’s a design issue tied back to silicon errata on a processor. Another day it is a supply chain issue, other times it’s regulatory problems. The process of surmounting issues from a diversity of topics gave me a lot of experience in a lot of different domains—I am an expert generalist, so to speak. The big lesson I’ve taken away from the last 10 years of working for myself or someone else is that problems don’t typically get solved in a breakthrough or big bang sort of way. Problems get ground down or nickled and dimed to death. Numerous small actions ultimately sum up to a solved problem, completed project, or released product. It doesn’t matter if the problem at hand is a backlog of 2000 undocumented change notices or trying to capture an elusive random event with test equipment or getting through EMC testing for 41 countries.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Places to Visit: Model Train Museum in Balboa Park Torrey Pines Glider Port UC San Diego Campus Food: Nico’s Taco Shop in Carmel Valley Mariscos German off Beyer and the 905 The Grill at Torrey Pines

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My parents, my girlfriend, Ms. Coordt, Prof Charles Tu, Dr. Ebonee Williams, and Dr. Terrance R. Mayes.

Website: wurzbachelectronics.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-wurzbach-a8163389/

Image Credits
Headshot was taken by a staff photographer at UCSD; I have no further info. All of the other photos, except for 1 were taken by me. The one where I am sitting at a work bench in an orange shirt was taken by my girlfriend, jody bode.