Well, it looks like on Tuesday I will be officially leaving the ranks of the unemployed. As fun as it is to have brunch three times a week in all kinds of interesting cafes, get all those life administration tasks sorted, and swan about at conferences, the fear of potential nothingness is a stressful thing to have on your back. Even for someone in as good a position as I have been. The phrase “job security” seems to take on a certain literalness.

In total I spent about about three months actively job-seeking, and five weeks unemployed. Which seems to suggest you should start looking for a new job about a month before you realise you want to. As well as putting the IT job feeds from Seek etc into my feed reader, I “activated my networks”, so to speak ( = told my friends, acquaintances at meetups, and my micro/blog). In the end there were 4 options that I seriously considered. For someone who does not have “X years of technology Y” Seek did prove to be useless. But if you are a Java/.NET/COBOL or even a PHP or Visual Basic person, you will find plenty to keep you busy.

Option #1 was a small business in Carlton North with a small suite of web-based applications for a particular retail sector. I met their business analyst when I decided to attend The Hive for the first time that week and he struck up a conversation with me. I mentioned that I was looking for work as a Python programmer and he did a double-take, then told me his company was looking for Python people. (Actually he told me they were looking for Java people to convert their Python applications to Java, which I light heartedly protested about. They wanted to do that because of trouble finding Python people, though.) So it was a great chance meeting, and I was not too surprised to get a follow-up email later that week.

While they seemed like good people, I think the role would have stretched me a little more than I am ready for right now. I mean some stretching is good, but then there is biting off more than you can chew and setting yourself up for failure. So I had the novelty of my first experience of declining a job offer.

Option #2 arose via someone responding to my blog post, which is pretty sweet. Some weeks passed and eventually a phone-based technical interview was set up, which I kinda bombed. It was one of those “impossible to prepare for” type tests and indeed I felt unprepared. So I didn’t hear back from them but it’s not so bad. I would have had to move to Sydney anyway. :P

Option #3 came about via a good friend of mine. It was kind of like, “Help me brainstorm where I could work.” “What about my workplace?” Her experience of working there was certainly a ringing endorsement, and I think she did the same for me to them. While also a small business, I was impressed at their thoroughness at getting the basics right – interview, technical test, checking references (something Option #1 didn’t fare well at). I would probably have done C# and maybe some IronPython. Broadening my skills in a commercially recognised way would certainly be no bad move. And I would have been very happy to accept their offer, were it not for…

Option #4, in the public sector, and I actually found out about it from a tech-usergroup-acquaintance posting to some mailing lists I’m on. The main things that drew me to this position were the fact that it is Python and deals with language data. That’s pretty much my dream combo at the moment. The interview went pretty well, despite a bumpy start and (in hindsight) a completely wrong answer, nonetheless delivered with conviction and seemingly accepted in same. I realised parallels with my previous work that I hadn’t seen before, and was able to ‘riff’ on those for a bit. I did feel ‘in my element’ enough to give off some confidence and I’m sure that helped a lot.

And so, I start on Tuesday. :)

Dear world, I am officially job-hunting!

Well, I don’t think this is the done thing, but where can one self-promote if not on one’s own blog. And I am relying on my networks to throw up interesting possibilities that don’t tend to rank high on SEEK. :)

So: I’m looking for a full-time software/web development position in inner Melbourne.

I’m a professional cross-disciplinarian: early-career computational linguist, software developer and hobby open source geek, organiser and speaker. I’m particularly interested in web-based development, agile development and development using high-level languages like Python. I’m particularly experienced in Prolog-based machine translation development, and have some experience in Python, PHP, C, .NET/C#. You wouldn’t hire me because I ticked a box that says “X years of technology Y” (unless Y==Prolog), but rather because I have an excellent analytical mind, an aptitude for new technologies, a deep interest in the field and a broad set of other generically useful skills like communication, documentation and team work.

What I’d like:

• I would love to work with natural language data, but I suspect those gigs are hard to come by here.
• With or without that, I want a job with ongoing challenges or problem-solving required. (And not challenges like, “Well, we don’t have unit tests, so have fun figuring out what this bug is.”)
• I want a workplace that supports learning (in particular, I would like to work & learn under someone with a decent amount more experience than I) and management that recognises initiative.
• I would prefer to work in a high-level language (because I think that they enable more rapid development, and leave more time for solving the interesting parts of problems), but I could live with good-practices-practiced in PHP or .NET or maybe C++.

So if you know of an interesting workplace looking to hire, please let me know. Comments below or email me at brianna@laugher.id.au. Oh and there is some more specifics about what I’ve done on LinkedIn. Thanks!