It’s been over a month now, and I thought I would officially announce that I’ve quit my job at Dolby and have joined the team at Scribd. The decision was decidedly bittersweet, since I’ll be leaving a rockstar team at Dolby. But, in the end, I realized that I already made the decision to be in the web industry the day I got into web design, blogging, and the social web phenomenon.

Since Scribd’s team is small (7 people at the moment), I’ve been keen on helping out wherever my skill set is valuable, ranging from coding, designing, and product developing. The role that I see myself playing in the long term is product development, which is something I’ve been wanting to get into for a long time.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my aspirations in the past few months. I started my college life as a traditional electrical engineer–or, transistor jockey. After a short stint at Intel, I realized that placing transistors on a silicon wafer bored me to death. So, I decided to shift my focus to signal processing, which eventually led me down the road as an audio codec engineer. At the same time, I was also getting heavily involved in web design, blogging, and graphic design.

There was a phase when I was hot on pursuing a career as a professor–a life of research. Now, I’m doing product development at a consumer focused startup. How did I get from there to here? Obviously, each step in the progression was gradual, but, thinking about it all at once, I’m still bewildered about the magnitude of the change. Early in my college career, I naively thought that what I was learning at that point was going to be my final intellectual destination. Boy, was I wrong.

In any case, I’m very happy with the changes that are happening. The best thing about it is that I’m being exposed to so many different elements of business and technical skills that I’ve never touched on before. Switching gears is a good thing.