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allsystemsgo 11y ago

Best advice in this thread, hands down. I have some co-workers who are heading off to Google, Apple, etc. And while that's great, and I'm happy for them, I would never want anything like that. Why? I love work life balance too much. I love my side projects too much. I'll probably get a remote gig somewhere that pays the bills, gives me some spending money, and enjoy more time with my wife and dog. I could never do that at some big tech company.

vonmoltke 11y ago
Personally, I won't consider moving to the Valley because I value my work-life balance and standard of living more than the prestige of my job. It is also too far from both my and my wife's families. It's a struggle, though, because what I can't seem to get what I want to do professionally either here in Texas or on the East Coast.
- afarrell 11y ago
  OOC, what do you want to do professionally?
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    I want to do firmware development, device driver development, and real-time embedded development. I'm particularly interested in doing this in the signal processing domain because I really like dealing with sensor systems and data. My degree is electrical engineering, and I spent almost 10 years working a combination of hardware production support, test software development, signal processing algorithm development, and "big" real-time embedded code development. I left that world because of internal political issues (long-ish story). Now I have spent 3 years in NLP R&D and that is what I get typecast as. Every "Who is hiring?" thread I see a bunch of companies with very interesting positions who might actually be willing to take a flier on me, but they are all in SF. In the past year I have only been able to get three companies to even talk to me about roles I actually want. One decided to pass because I was in Texas (they were in DC and very early stage) and I apparently wasn't strong enough to warrant relocation, and two I had to pass on because they hit me up at the exact wrong time (demo leadup crunch time).
    - VicinitasTech 11y ago
      I noticed on your linkedIn that you went to FAU - any interest in relocating back to the Boca Raton area? I'm hiring c# / .NET developers, which I know isn't exactly what you are looking for. We are a one year old start up working on making world-class cancer care accessible to more people and are finally bringing in our first full-time software dev. The first projects are going to be systems integration and internal tools work but we have the potential to move into some interesting data problems down the road (albeit still not within the lower-level realms you mention). My email is in my profile if you're interested.
    - dllthomas 11y ago
      Historically, there's been plenty of that in Texas...

afarrell 11y ago

So suppose I know what I want in an easily definable and describable sense. Where does one go to get advise about how the world works with respect to that goal and to bounce ideas for a plan of action off of? Self knowledge is super important, but the Sun Tzu quote about knowing yourself has another half: you also have to know what you're dealing with. (In my specific case: getting myself into a good position to eventually apply to work in the UK 1-2 years from now, given a current background of 3 years in DevOps and Python web dev)

beat 11y ago
Start with people who have already done what you want to do. If you can meet them personally and ask, do so (and getting to meet them can itself be quite a task). If they're historical or inaccessible, learn about them. Heroes and role models really matter. Find "a man to be emulated and admired". What you'll sometimes find is that they'll teach you to not do what they did. For example, I'm a guitarist, and a very good one. I work hard at it. I had the opportunity to have a few conversations with the greatest guitarist I've ever met, and extraordinary musician. What I found out is that he's a very small person in a lot of ways. He practices or gigs about 12 hours a day, every day. He can't talk about much other than playing music. At that, he's tremendously deep. At everything else in life, he's a wreck.
ownagefool 11y ago
Why do you need to wait?
beat 11y ago
So "What do you want?" is "I want to live in the UK". I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that where you live trumps what you do here. It's probably worth asking yourself why you want to live there, but I presume there's a good answer (family, love the culture, etc). So the next question is, "What kind of work skills will get me a job and a clean work visa in the UK?" This means the people you should be talking to are recruiters who bring people from your country to the UK to work in your field, to find out what they're looking for. You should also be talking to other programmers with a similar background to yours who made the transition you want to make, to find out what worked for them and what mistakes they made. Unless you have a specific place you want to be (say, London), you should figure out where in the UK you want to be. It's a big place with a wide variety of culture and living conditions. From there, you can start looking at employers in the area, figure out what they're looking for.