University of Eastern Finland alumnus Tuomas Vallius is a team leader at Meta for product development and manufacturing teams working on display glasses.
Who are you and what do you do for work?
I am Tuomas Vallius and I live on the west coast of the US, in the more mountainous Washington. It often gets mixed up with the capital of the country, Washington D.C., which is on the opposite coast. I lead product development and manufacturing teams for the display glasses system at Meta, with teams located in Redmond, Washington, Silicon Valley, Taiwan and China.
What inspired you to pick a career in the tech industry?
Natural sciences always felt easy for me in upper secondary school, and we had a great physics teacher, Markku Säily, who was good at inspiring students. We made holograms, radios and electric motors while learning about related physics principles. It lit up a spark in me, and I got in to study physics in Joensuu thanks to a physics competition.
How did you find your path in the tech industry?
My career path has been a series of coincidences. The most important factor has not been my competence, but taking up opportunities that have come up by coincidence and thanks to knowing people. I started working at the Department of Physics in 1999. At that time, Nanocomp CEO Veli-Pekka Leppänen offered a few projects on the side (grateful to Vellu for offering me that opportunity) where I occasionally did measurements or simulations of micro-optics for their company. Through those projects, I learned more about their company over the years, and seven years later I switched to work for them full time to continue working on diffractive waveguides for different kinds of displays.
Later, I went to work for EpiCrystals in Tampere to develop lasers and diffractive waveguides for displays. I already knew several people there professionally, the work seemed interesting, and Tampere felt like an attractive city after living in Joensuu for several years. We produced optics for companies like MicroVision and a small fibre scanner projector for glasses displays for the founder of Magic Leap. People who I knew from those companies later became my colleagues at Microsoft and Meta. More than ten years later, I ran into that small projector prototype in a military project. Unfortunately, EpiCrystals was eventually destined to go bankrupt, as was the case for most ambitious start-ups.
An acquaintance told me about a new team at Microsoft, and I moved to Espoo to start working on diffractive waveguide development for the HoloLens display. It was the world’s first headset display that could produce virtual images on top of the real world and have the virtual images stay in place even when the user moved freely around a building. I also moved to the United States and my job description changed to encompass the entire development of the HoloLens display optics system, where I was responsible for the Hololens2 product and the version for the US military.
After the Microsoft military project, I moved on to Facebook and returned to the basics of diffractive optics to develop basic physics modelling for waveguide components. After the first year, I once again took leadership of the development of the entire display system for all product projects with transparent displays.
In reality, though, none of it was that straightforward. During those years, I was also a visiting researcher in Hungary, had a post-doc position in Japan and Arizona, and was even a diving instructor in Asia. I went far and wide to find my way. My role also changed several times between working as an individual engineer and as the head of a 100-person organisation. All that taught me important lessons, ranging from working in the tech industry to keeping a group together under pressure 40 metres below water.
What have been the highlights of your career so far?
Definite highlights include working with a good team to get really difficult products out on the market. Timetables are really aggressive, and the customer is only interested in the product. Not how hard it is to make. This often entails good prioritization and focus on solving critical problems to get the product out on time. Days are long and problems need to get solved in time. The different generations of HoloLens and the Meta Ray-Ban Display are currently the greatest highlights for me. The last few months before getting a product out have always been tight squeezes, but they have also created a sense of community where everyone helps each other.
What skills and qualities do you consider most important for your success in the tech industry?
Everyone wants hardworking people with good technical skills. That’s the base level. But beyond a certain line, adding on more hours or improving your technical skills will have little benefit.
People who know how to lead others usually get the farthest. Specialists who are able to make a situation clearer for everyone, to lead the way. Those who create a good atmosphere around them and motivate the organisation to go in the right direction. People who understand what problems are the right ones to solve, ensuring that the organisation can get it done on time.
Leadership is everyone’s job, not just the supervisors’. Understanding this and taking responsibility for it has been one of the greatest insights in my career. Especially because the largest companies tend to invest the most in individuals who are able to steer their colleagues, supervisors and the rest of the organisation in the right direction.
It also pays to be bold and seize new opportunities. Sometimes it reveals the next direction. What people regret most is not having the courage to try something instead of trying and failing.
How would you describe your work in tech teams? What do you value most in cooperation?
The work is very dynamic, and you often have to change direction very quickly as you learn new things. Especially in large US corporations, expectations may be unreasonably high, but they might also offer high compensation in return. That’s why they really invest in developing and training people.
You need a huge number of people to produce difficult products. I really appreciate people’s ability to work together and solve both technical and interpersonal issues, allowing the rest of the organisation to focus on the work in peace.
What advice would you give to someone considering a career the tech industry?
Work is a way of financing your life, so you should consider it holistically. Where do you want to live? What kind of life do you want to have? What do you enjoy in life? After that, you can start thinking about what kind of work would suit those parameters of time use, pay and location.
If you are not absolutely incredibly good at a single thing, it’s generally a better idea to choose a job with good employment prospects where even an average employee gets adequate compensation. The top one per cent of people making YouTube videos do great, but the average tech professional does much better than the average YouTuber. At the same time, the work should play to your personal strengths and consist of tasks that are enjoyable for you at least most of the time.
Start-up or large corporation?
All jobs offer plenty of opportunities to learn. For me, I started with start-ups and then moved on to bigger companies. Large corporations do offer a lot of opportunities for individuals because they have more resources to invest in training people and improving their performance. A small company cannot afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on improving an individual engineer’s technical competence or communication skills.
You can also learn about the interplay of a corporation’s operative side, HR, finances and product development and how to manage projects on a massive scale. At the same time, you often get to engage with subcontracting networks, giving you a look at the customer’s perspective in really varying projects, which lets you learn what the customer wants. This is why I think that, if you have the opportunity to choose between a start-up or a large corporation, you might want to start your career in a large corporation. From there, you can move on to the world of start-ups, armed with more knowledge and improved skills. This way, you’ll be able to help a smaller company by transferring new expertise to their staff, which allows you to offer that company more value besides your personal work input.
Large international corporations also offer similar career trajectories for specialists and supervisory personnel alike. In a large organisation, you can get identical pay as a specialist or a supervisor because both career paths run parallel to each other. Smaller companies rarely offer those kinds of opportunities, and career development often requires transferring to supervisory positions. You can also switch between those two paths from a specialist to a supervisor. And I’ve personally learned a lot by doing that switch.
How do you see future opportunities and challenges in the tech industry?
With the accelerated development of technology, many skills are becoming obsolete. That’s why you should invest in your personal expertise and find ways to utilise new technology before someone else does it first. Changes can be very surprising and much faster than anyone could imagine.
I have seen so much of the work around me taken over by AI, but at the same time, as problems become more and more complex, interpersonal interaction has also become very important. That’s why I would like to see future education in tech include more focus on leadership and negotiation skills. No matter what direction the world goes, those aspects will remain important as long as there are people around.
What are the most important lessons you have learned during your career and would like to share with younger generations?
Be a solution, not a problem. If you constantly need your supervisor’s help to make progress, you are more of a problem than a solution. At that point, you should reflect on how you can solve problems and not cause them. Many difficult challenges can be solved more easily through cooperation than working at it alone.
If you dream of a career in tech, you should be prepared to move to areas with plenty of opportunities. New jobs, people and ideas. Makes it more likely for you to find something that suits you.
Control the pace or others will control it for you. Things often get chaotic. At that point, it’s best that you make a plan and agree on it with the team, rather than allowing the chaos or other external forces control what you do and when.
Ask people how they would solve a problem and give them the opportunity to make their own plans for it. It will make them more motivated, and when things go wrong, they’ll be more motivated to fix any issues. They also get to learn, and next time, they’ll consider the risks already at the planning stage. This way, everyone learns to lead the organisation and is responsible for the success of projects.
Save and invest part of your income instead of spending it all. Especially in US companies, wages may drop to less than a half in one go as stock prices fluctuate. Or they might stop paying wages with no warning. Prepare for surprises like that by saving and investing part of your pay. Elevate your standard of living based on your savings and investments, not your pay raise.
Look after yourself. Both mentally and physically.
