Job Hunting

Later this year (August 24th to be precise) I'm going to be out of a job.

This isn't coming as a surprise. The capricious decisions of funding bodies are well known, and it's been 18 months since it first became clear that the place I work wasn't going to get funded.

So what to do? The severance package isn't to be sneezed at, and I haven't yet seen anything sufficently attractive to be worth turning redundancy down. So I'm going to hang on till the end - and expect to be busy keeping systems running while decommissioning as much as possible and setting up those researchers moving elsewhere.

Family commitments limit me to Cambridge (so we're not moving or emigrating). Or within an hour or so travelling - which could include some parts of London. Fortunately the area isn't a technological wasteland. And I don't mind travelling, using home as a base.

I really want to stick with Solaris, at some level. It's what I know, and what I enjoy. And I'm reasonably confident that some part of the University or some research group will need someone like me.

Should I stick to regular employment though? Or should I think about consultancy?

At least, with a redundancy package, I have the luxury of being able to wait a while rather than having to take the first thing that comes along just to pay the mortgage. Or I can try something different and be able to pull out if it turns out to be a mistake.

So, if anyone reading this has an interesting Solaris/OpenSolaris project that could use someone in the Cambridge (UK) area later in 2005, let me know!