I am wondering what kind of jobs the adults have...

[Mike Soukup]

Software engineers are a minority in the FIRST community, but I'm one of 'em. I work for Motorola, on the iDEN system (Nextel is our main customer). We design & develop the whole iDEN system and sell it to anyone with enough money to buy it. My department of 150 or so people develops the piece of infrastructure that controls the dispatch (2-way / push to talk) portion of the phones, as well as mobility management (keeping track of where each phone is). The team of 4 people I work with develops software that's used to test our department's product. We simulate other components of the iDEN system and generate hundreds of calls per second in order to test the box's capacity & capabilities under high call load.

That's my job. It may not sound exciting to everyone, but I enjoy it. It's challenging (most of the time) and fun (again, most of the time).

Mike