Journal TheRaven64's Journal: Getting a Job 4
Someone on Slashdot recently claimed I hadn't read Keep the Aspidistra Flying because I thought the ending was depressing. After I finished my PhD in 2007, I've managed to avoid the same fate and have successfully avoided having a real job for almost five years. I've done freelance programming and written four books, and had a lot of time to post on Slashdot (as you can tell from the fact that, so far, I've posted more than anyone else this quarter) and do open source stuff (Ohloh ranks me in the top 2,000 geeks with no life^W^W^W^Wopen source developers).
That's about to change though. I had two interesting job offers recently (I seem to get job offers from banks very often, but I have a very low tolerance for tedium, so I'd probably have been fired around day 3 if I'd taken any of them). One was from Google in Paris (yay!) but working on boring things (boo!). The other was from Cambridge University, which is about as well paid as you expect in academia (aww!) but basically involves working on the same stuff I do for fun (yay!) with some very intelligent people (yay!). Oh, and it's in a city where a quick search found four tango classes (yay!) and property prices not much lower than London (oops!) and which is both small and flat enough that I can cycle everywhere (yay!) and so does everyone else (look out!).
So, in a few weeks I'm moving to Cambridge. I'll miss looking out at the sea, but being able to dance tango more than once a week should be some compensation. There also seems to be a lively salsa scene, although having to learn yet another set of names for the same Rueda steps is going to be a little tiresome...
When I visited, I went for drinks with some of the makerspace guys the night before my interview (I have no idea how much I drank, but it didn't seem to affect my interview performance too badly...) and met someone who worked on the C++11 atomics spec (which I was in the middle of implementing at the time) and someone who had ported 2BSD to a 32-bit PIC with 128KB of RAM, so it definitely seems like a city with no shortage of geeks...
Cambridge & bikes (Score:2)
Just a warning with bikes in Cambridge. You need a good lock. Leaving it for few seconds outside a shop can get it stolen really quickly.
You're going to meet so many geeks...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Fen [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
My father went to university in Cambridge. He took his bike and bought a brand new lock for it. The first time he left it locked up, someone stole the lock... and left the bike.
I've already been in contact with ARM and there are some opportunities for consulting there - hopefully I'll be able to make a few more contacts. I'm going to be working with some of the guys I met originally when I was at XenSource - small world...
Good for you (Score:1)
Good luck there
Nice (Score:2)
Getting paid to do what you do for fun sounds like a good deal.
I need to work out a way to get paid for cleaning up mistakes on Wikipedia.