UK? No, I'm not 'kay.

So the roller coaster that has been climbing the hill for three weeks, going chk-chk-chk, is about to go over the top. I'm on a plane tomorrow, and it still doesn't seem real. Though I've been studying and practicing so much that I'm pretty much just ready to get things over with.

There's still a number of likely questions that I'm just dreading being asked. The potential for humiliation just seems massive, and their generosity just seems to make it worse (I don't think they'd ever actually say, "We flew you all the way up here and you don't even know what a websocket is?" but that's what a missed question will feel like.) (Note to self: look up websockets.)

As terrifying as the interview is looking, getting an offer would be almost as terrifying. You know how dolphins can "walk" on top of the water by kicking their tail back and forth really hard? I was thinking recently that that's what my career feels like a lot of the time. I've developed a strong tail from it over the years but a few months back I was thinking how nice it would be to just swim about in the water for a bit. If I get in at Big Company, I'll not only continue the water-walking thing, but I'll have a ball balanced on my nose to boot.

I just had prep phone interview number 3, which contained detailed feedback about the tech phone interview I did last week, and a more detailed breakdown of what I'll be asked about. It did nothing to relieve my stress levels; in fact, after things seeming so surreal all week (especially, going into the office as if everything's normal), this brought reality crashing home. I'll be having five one-hour sessions, each involving at least two of the leadership questions I'm dreading (E.g. "Tell me about a time you took a risk and it failed"). One of the sessions will be entirely that. My "down time" will be a one-hour lunch interview with the managing director of their development centre (boss of 110 people).

I really think they're considering me for too high of a position, as I've barely done much in the way of leading, and I'll be considered for what they call an SD3 (software developer level 3), which they need just a few of, instead of an SD2, which they need a lot of. The day before the interview I'll be getting prep call number four (!) that will at least inform me in fairly specific detail what leadership questions each group will be asking me. But there won't be a lot I can fix at that point, or even now.

Marjorie has been great about trying to buck up my spirits. But I'm pretty sure my concerns are reality-based as opposed to just beating myself up out of a lack of confidence. (This is not to be construed as further beating up of myself, either, please.)

Still, I wrote up something that's a little long to be called a mantra, but which I'll try to keep in mind during the process: “Above all, don’t be intimidated. Especially, no nervous jokes about the pressure of the interview situation, the scale of the company, the surroundings, or the prospective role, or my lack of experience with this or that. Act like this is all natural and fine and expected. Be serious and calm, even if you flub a question, or even if you ace a question. Don't be overly relieved at the end. Don’t speak at all if your voice is breaking out of nervousness (this is a major concern of mine), or if you don't know how you're going to finish a sentence. Don't talk just to fill up space. And remember everyone’s goddamn name for once.”

So at least it'll be all over Tuesday evening, yeah? No. To further complicate things, I had an interview last night with a company in Cambridge, who now wants to see me while I'm up there. They're more of a startup with much shallower pockets - but it could be an alright thing. I'll have next to no spare time while I'm up there, and from what I can tell, you can't really get to Cambridge from Edinburgh. I'm also not keen to take advantage of Big Company's hospitality. (I laid this all out for them, and they just now emailed me back, offering to fly me Edinburgh to Stansted (the London airport everyone forgets is there), then up to their office, during one of the two days I was planning on checking out Edinburgh with Marjorie. Sure. Fine. What else can I say?)

Increasingly, sleep has been just an occasional visitor, who leaves abruptly in the wee hours as if he has an early train to catch. I suspect to see him only here and there in the coming week.

It's all a helluva thing. I don't have any category to put the whole experience into.

[Sad trumpet noise]

Well, that sucks. Big Company in Edinburgh won't be making the offer. I guess I didn't do as well as I thought. I got pretty extensive feedback and couldn't really argue with any of it; they picked out what I agreed were my weak points and said they couldn't get past them in their considerations. But they said I was close (in a way that didn't just sound like they were blowing smoke). And that it's not uncommon for people to get in after several attempts, and they encouraged me to try again in six months to a year.

Drat. It's pretty gutting after working hard and getting my hopes up. I felt like I did as well as I could, but I'm still going to sulk a while.

Meanwhile, it sounds like the Cambridge company wants me. Their CTO is calling me in an hour; I don't think there'll be an offer until next week, but I may have to make a decision soon.

Almost

So, after a period of wondering if it ever might happen, I got close to landing a job in London.

They were willing to sponsor, and I had two interviews, the second with the CEO.  I was a pretty good match, and did pretty good on the interview, but it didn't pan out in the end, unfortunately.

It's given us some hope, but still, it's back to the drawing board right now.  A few irons in the fire still, but I'm having a hard time just getting past the recruiters.

We are still in the process of trying to downsize our life (i.e. get rid of stuff), but we were long overdue for that anyway.  Whatever happens, were not going to be spending another winter in this house -- probably not even another summer.  We need a change.

Hard

Oh it's hard.

The killer is, I've looked at so many jobs, that even if I were find a job tomorrow, it would still mean that 99% of my job-hunting effort was fruitless.  That's just how it works: you roll the dice until you hit Yahtzee.  But it also means that I'm pretty much as close as I was when I started.

In other news, we'll be casting the net wider.

More Brexit

Brexit is looking more and more like a colossal cock-up, but again, that's only the general consensus among the people I know and the media I access.  We can only keep watching the situation and keep trying.  Another potential complicating factor is the imminent decline of London as a financial center.  There seem to be a lot of jobs there in that sector.  Not that I'm looking in London yet, or for that sort of job particularly, but if that all shuts down, there could be a glut of developers on the market.  Uncertain times.

Brexit

Brexit -- wow, that was an historic moment.  (I can say "an historic" when talking about Britain.)  There were enough hints that it was going to go that way, but how weird it still was, when every person I know online, and every editorial source on news sites I frequent, were pulling for Britain to stay in the EU.  Shows how de facto segregated things are, even in this day and age of supposed connection.  Maybe the winning side are wondering, who are all these people who voted to stay in?

I don't fully understand everything that went on, admittedly.  My impression of how this affects our plans to "Brenter" is this, though, in general: not good.

• The anti-immigrant sentiment that won the day can't be good.  There is a basic dumb truth that, as a white male Westerner, it won't affect my chances to get in nearly as much as many others, but how can I feel good about that?  If I do get in, I so much prefer living, working, and being in a diverse culture.
• We trade out the conservative Cameron for the staunch conservative -- who, Boris Johnson maybe?  Not someone I'd relish living under, but worse, even among the downtrodden who are allowed to stay, the safety net will inevitably be cut.  Which sucks on its own, for a lot of people, but personally, it means that Marjorie will have a much harder job finding work in social services.
• What I really forgot to factor in was the pound.  It's already plummeted, against both the US dollar and the Aussie dollar.  This means I'd be earning less there, period.

The one possible favorable outcome is, I wouldn't be competing against all of the EU.  Britain's Tier 2 work visa currently requires companies to show that they can't find someone within the EU to fill the position -- presumably this will go away, but who knows how long it will take.

It's been difficult so far, trying to find work.  I've sent out a lot of CVs -- easy enough in this day and age, but if it's easy for me, it's easy for everyone, and so, how to stand out?  The responses have been tepid at best.  I get occasional glimmers of interest, but it's largely from recruiters who give up when they realize I need sponsorship.

We may have to consider other options, but I will keep at it.  I think we can still make it happen.

CV

I made this [letter] very long only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.  -- Blaise Pascal

When we moved to Australia, a couple of recruiters called me out because my resume, done in American style, was only two pages.  Australian CVs are expected to be multiple pages, if justified.  So I made a longer one and have been using it ever since.

UK companies apparently expect only two pages at max.  So today I took my five page CV and somehow pared it down to just two pages.  It was a pain, and not just because I had to fight with Word.

But: it's been submitted now to a UK jobs website, so to some extent, the die is cast.  I suspect I will have to do a lot more work than just waiting for companies to come to me, but we were getting antsy about actually starting to make something happen, so this is a good step.

England plans

So that last post was actually written back in January, but I didn't post it until today.  I'm thinking I might as well revive this blog to keep people informed about our England plans, which yes, are still in progress.  It's generally the worst idea to talk about a thing like this before the actual commitment is there, due to the psychological phenomena I've seen mentioned a few time recently, whereby announced plans tend to fall by the wayside because announcing them gives your brain the payoff ahead of time, leaving only the drudgery of execution.  And man, is there some drudgery ahead.

Still we are pushing on.  We've kind of settled on Bristol as a target - it seems a vibrant city, with weather less miserable than most other UK cities - though it is still very much up in the air.  A lot will depend on where I can find a job.  (Of course, the whole plan depends on if I can find a job.)  I found a massive database put out by the UK government, of companies that are willing to sponsor new hires for Tier 2 visas.  It's in PDF form, with ill-formatted text, and so was a fun challenge to convert it into plain text, filter out the ones with "software" in their name, and geocode them all so I can see them on a map:



A lot are (of course) clustered around London, which may be where we end up out of necessity.  There's only one such company in Bristol (to the left by the controls).

But I can't really apply until we're a lot closer to ready, since I want to be able to actually accept a job and not leave Marjorie in Australia to take care of everything.  So we're in the process of sorting out our stuff.  And it's the same headache I posted about in the early days of this blog, when we were moving to Singapore: every single item in the house involves a store/ship/toss/sell decision.  There's plenty to do on top of that as well, of course.

Next steps

Marjorie and I have moved around a fair a bit at this point, but have been in Melbourne now for close to twelve years.  This is not to say we’ve settled.  We both love Australia in general and Melbourne in particular, but it feels a bit like golden handcuffs.  We’ve talked in the past about buying a house here (we’ve been to a number of auctions and talked to mortgage brokers even) but it just never seemed to happen, probably in part because of a vague dissatisfaction with the idea.

We also have talked a fair bit over the years about trying somewhere else.  Maybe back to the States?  Some places we’ve considered, roughly from most interested to least:

• San Fran - cold, expensive, and Marjorie has a better chance of scoring a job some place that’s a seat of government..
• Austin - would be living in Texas.
• San Diego - unknown to Marjorie, and same job issues for her, but we may go look at some point, Still California-expensive.
• Boulder - cold and small?
• Seattle/Portland - cold and gray.
• Atlanta - feels like going backwards.
• New York - too hectic for Marjorie.  And expensive and not dog-friendly.
• Boston - cold, both weather- and people-wise (my opinion - I’ve just never latched onto that city.  Marjorie likes it a lot more than me).

Add to all of them that the USA just seems nuts to us now.  We’ve considered some other places overseas as well:

• Germany - cold, and language barrier
• France - cold, and language barrier
• Spain - language barrier
• Japan - culture shock, language

It’s harder to move now that we’re older (just because it would be harder to find jobs) and because we have a dog we love dearly.

So yesterday (30/1/2016) Marjorie and I had an idle discussion, as we frequently do, about what we’re going to do.  And for once, an idea seemed to take hold: move to England.  Not London proper, which would seem to be a lot to deal with, but an outlying suburb or anywhere to the south, like Brighton (in hopes of marginally better weather).  We’re in the very early stages of feeling it out, obviously, but we both seemed to latch onto the idea and I think it might actually happen.  We’ve done the overseas move before so we know what it entails, and know we’re capable of it.  And we know enough to keep a lid on things until we nail something down, which is why I’m writing this here.

Lots to do from this point, but it’s exciting.

I can't vouch for the numbers, but this website still gives me a good feeling about being here.

Our suburb

We moved to Moonee Ponds a few years back just to check out life in Melbourne's northwest suburbs.  After a few years, we'll say it's not a bad place, but not as dynamic as we'd like.  But I just found this video about it made by a realtor if you're curious.  The park and race track they show are both about a block from us.  Moonee Ponds is also famous as the home town of both Dame Edna and the actor who portrays her.

Gainfully unemployed

Yeah, so, I came back from our trip to the USA to find I no longer had a job.  Retrenched, redundant, downsized.

I'm not distressed.  It's a bad time of year to be looking for work -- not just because of Christmas, but because Australia seems to have an additional holiday immediately afterward known as "January" (similar to the one in Europe known as "August").  But there still seem to be jobs to be had out there.  If I find something before Christmas, great; but if not, I'm not going to sweat it.  I'm just trying to get my ducks in a row -- rework my CV, skill up, canvas lists of companies, etc.  My days are full and I'm a far sight from unhappy.  And of course the dog is happy to have me.

The time off also gives me time to get my life in order a bit.  People write entire self-help books about it but here's what works for me:

• Actively using an online to-do list site.  I use todoist.com (but there are lots of others); I've been on it for a long time but not actively until these last two weeks.
• Only schedule for tomorrow.  In the evening pull in a short list of tasks you think you can get done.  Leave everything else unscheduled.
• Make sure you have at least one simple task in the day's to-do list.  If you don't have a simple one to pull in, make one up.
• Do the simple tasks first on a given day.  This gets the ball rolling and starts the feeling of accomplishment.  And the harder, more important tasks will be a lot easier to concentrate on when you have fewer tasks hanging over your head.
• Make sure there's something each day that gets you out of the house!

Still, I'm finding it curious that (like everyone else it seems) I'm capable of putting in eight hour days for forty-some weeks of a year doing stuff for other people, but the idea of doing a solid eight-hour day doing stuff just for myself seems onerous.  I'm continually breaking up my tasks by running Hamish up to the cafe or something.

Thoughts on our most recent trip back to the USA

This visit back was a reminder of how pretty the United States is, especially in Autumn. We don’t have the same dramatic colours here in Melbourne. Culturally the US seems more and more foreign to me each visit back as well. I think this is probably equally attributed to my getting older and just being out of touch with pop culture as it is with the time away.

Crystal Bridges museum is definitely worth a visit if you ever find yourself in the vicinity (Bentonville, AR). The museum was truly world class, all that Walmart money is good for something, and there’s a lot happening outside the main building as well, including a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a beaver in the creek both of which I will have to return to see as it was way too cold to spend time outside the day we visited.

Rainbow narcosis, a video installation I watched at Crystal Bridges is so bizarre and oddly delightful (though warped) that I needed to link it here: http://vimeo.com/68236151

New York - This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well, but my opinion remains unrevised, while I enjoy visiting I really don’t want to live in NYC. Mark on the other hand would love living there. For me, the city's too crowded, I'm too claustrophobic to ever really relax in New York, though I do like the mania.

The slogan for the New York lottery is “hey, you never know” this amused us muchly during our visit.

This was an especially busy return trip for me as I had reunions with several friends I hadn't seen in years. I caught up with several friends from my university days (Tim, Tom, Bob, Rich and Lana) and finally caught up with my good friend Karen, and even managed to see a friend from Melbourne whose moved to North America (Elise). Inevitably there are people we don't see on our return visits though, and we can only hope to catch up with them the next time round.

Stateside

So we're back in the USA for a visit.  Flying into and out of New York City just because we'd been meaning to make it back here for a while.  We just have a day here -- today -- on the front end so we just bopped around midtown, shopping and such, for most of the day.  We're staying in a hotel that backs onto the Empire State Building which is pretty cool.  I could write a long post here about New York but I want to talk about something else.

The differences between our home and adopted countries remains a continual source of interest.  After twelve years away it's mostly subtle things that come to our attention, or things that we've always noticed but never fully internalized, and sometimes it's complimentary to one country, sometimes the other.  The theme of this trip seems to be how much Americans overshare their personal lives, and how they all seem to have pet opinions that everyone must surely be interested in.  These are distinctly unAustralian traits.

On the leg of this trip where we flew from LA to NYC, the people in the row behind us had a loud conversation for much of the trip, which we had no real choice about eavesdropping on.  In the middle was a beleaguered Russian immigrant who was going to be working as a translator.  On either side of her were two New Yorkers who regaled her with their life stories, in exquisite detail.  The guy (Barry) especially -- I know so much about his life right now that I could do an identity theft on him, no doubt.  This went on for at least an hour.  The Russian woman was only giving polite, modest answers; we can't help but wonder what her opinion of Americans is from this.

Then at dinner tonight at Grimaldi's, we were forced to eavesdrop again.  At the next table a young software developer regaled his date with an unending monologue about his opinions about everything; opinions he clearly held in high regard.  She didn't get more than five seconds of uninterrupted dialogue for the whole hour.  We wanted to punch him by the end.

Obviously you can't generalize about a whole culture from a few isolated incidents, but these things certainly match America's reputation, and we've almost certainly been guilty of them ourselves.  And of course a few negative traits do not define a country; we're having a great time here amongst "our people" and have also seen a lot of small kindnesses.

New office

[Taps microphone] Is this thing on?

More a test of who's still following, so drop a comment if you're reading...

Anyway, my company has moved offices, and I've been loving it, despite being on support for the first week.  My explorer gene has kicked in; I'm never more happy than when I have a new area to explore.

Here's a shot of the area right in front of our new place.  Panoramic shots don't seem to fly as Facebook pictures, or on Imgur; I think no one can be bothered to actually zoom in.  But still, I've added a few annotations...

Nostalgia

Hey family -- remember this commercial?  The jingle popped into my head after... four decades?  That's good jingle.  So I decided to Google it.

Friend

Hamish made quick friends with this dog the other day.  They chased the ball non-stop for twenty minutes and finally took a break.  They were thick as thieves at this point.

Frosty morning

It's been seriously cold this week with no real relief in sight.  Our house does not heat terribly well so we are left to bundle up and shiver.

Olives

Trying to cure some olives that we picked off the tree in the backyard again this year.

Photogenic dog

Maybe we are biased, but we think Hamish is a good looking dog.