José Pérez Romero

What I love about working here is contributing significantly to building an impactful new company. I always liked the prospect of working for an “underdog” company and working toward beating the established players in the market. Semiconductors and photonics are industries with massive capital expenditures that tend to consolidate into oligopolies, and it motivates me a lot to know we are working against that trend.  This mission also reflects the personality and behavior of my co-workers. There is an energy and enthusiasm here that perhaps you wouldn’t find in an older company with more developed processes and structure.

We have to catch up to more established players, so the company and its employees must always be proactive.
Regarding my specific role, what I find interesting is the challenge of the knowledge gap between the general public and photonics. For example, did you know that the word photophobia (the fear of light) is searched on Google five times more frequently than the word photonics? Working at EFFECT Photonics allows me to bridge that gap and explain to people why photonics matters.

Applying here depends on your personality and what you look for at this career stage. If you want a more structured organization and narrowly-defined role with more specific responsibilities, you won’t find that at EFFECT Photonics. Things here can get a bit chaotic, and you will likely take on responsibilities that you wouldn’t take in a similar role at an older company.

It can get challenging, but that’s how you get to grow and learn quickly. As a bonus, since this company is still in its teenage years, your decisions will often also have more impact than those in more established companies.
If what I just said sounds attractive, you might be a good fit for working here, so go ahead and apply!

Communicating about technology.

It’s funny because all the work and studies I’ve done over the last decade have been condensed into this role. I studied telecommunications engineering and photonics at university, doing academic research on these subjects. Meanwhile, I had a side gig in sports media, writing articles and recording podcasts about European football.

Now I get to work in a role that allows me to produce content about photonics and telecommunications, a mix of both!
Ultimately, everything I do in my job—brainstorming topics, drafting, proofreading, scheduling, incorporating everyone’s feedback—is geared towards achieving the goal of communicating most effectively about the technology at EFFECT Photonics.

The biggest highlight here has been watching the growth and learning of the marketing team, the company in general, and myself. When I started in June 2021, we were only a team of three; by the end of summer 2022, we will be a team of six! We now have a proper content production pipeline with writing guidelines, well-defined target audience categories, and clear schedules. I compare my current articles to the ones I wrote when I started, and there is a significant improvement in how focused and concise they are now. And I know there is room for more improvements!

Sometimes we might feel stuck and that we are still far away from our goals as a team and organization, but we look back proudly at all that progress and get reminded of how far we’ve already come. We have to be patient and keep going, one step at a time.