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Publications and A New Employer
As broadly hinted in recent journal entries, I'm leaving my current place of employment. There has been a couple of major decisions on the future of the company by the governing board, and alas, I think that they are I don't think it is the wisest to say the least, but it is their decision. It's been particularly hard for me personally, as I have been an passionate advocate of this organisation and its purpose for many years. In my last couple of weeks I'm compiling my knowledge into various publications (proper-like, with ISBNs and all). I finished the first yesterday, with the snappy title Supercomputing with Linux (ISBN 978-0-9943373-0-6), and a further two are in the pipeline for next week, both half complete. The plan is to distribute these wih a CC license, so that the prime purpose of the organisation - providing researchers the capabilities to use high performance computing facilities - is carried out.
Shortly after that I'll be taking up a new job at the University of Melbourne with their Research Platforms group as an HPC Support and Training Officer, which means it is very similar to the job I've been doing for the last eight years or so at VPAC, but - I must acknowledge - with a fairly good pay increase. It generated a bit of hand-wringing over the past few weeks as I was also offered a position at a Sydney university as their eResearch Technical Team Leader which had an equivalent pay level but with more responsibilities, and apparently RMIT was also interested in taking me up (all too late, really). I gave a recruiter for Amazon a considered opinion on the matter.
I must say I've been quite lucky in life with my respective major employers: the Murdoch University Student Guild, the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party, the East Timorese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and now the University of Melbourne. All of them institutions I could have some degree of belief in and loyalty towards. Certainly my socialist preferences find it difficult to enjoy an environment where surplus value is extracted, but even more so where the strategic orientation of the organisation is towards monopolistic advantage. My interests are towards infrastructure and knowledge over consumables and commodities, towards public goods rather than private profits, towards the lasting rather than the ephemeral - and I have been so fortunate to have been granted the opportunities to put those orientations in practise.
Shortly after that I'll be taking up a new job at the University of Melbourne with their Research Platforms group as an HPC Support and Training Officer, which means it is very similar to the job I've been doing for the last eight years or so at VPAC, but - I must acknowledge - with a fairly good pay increase. It generated a bit of hand-wringing over the past few weeks as I was also offered a position at a Sydney university as their eResearch Technical Team Leader which had an equivalent pay level but with more responsibilities, and apparently RMIT was also interested in taking me up (all too late, really). I gave a recruiter for Amazon a considered opinion on the matter.
I must say I've been quite lucky in life with my respective major employers: the Murdoch University Student Guild, the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party, the East Timorese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and now the University of Melbourne. All of them institutions I could have some degree of belief in and loyalty towards. Certainly my socialist preferences find it difficult to enjoy an environment where surplus value is extracted, but even more so where the strategic orientation of the organisation is towards monopolistic advantage. My interests are towards infrastructure and knowledge over consumables and commodities, towards public goods rather than private profits, towards the lasting rather than the ephemeral - and I have been so fortunate to have been granted the opportunities to put those orientations in practise.
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I'm excited to hear about how the new job starts off :)
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From what I've been told I don't think I would have liked Amazon. High level destructive internal competition is not really my thing.
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And it is well about time that we caught up again. How does Saturday Dec 12 sound? I have a book that needs returning!
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But more seriously, UoM is a larger organisation that is hopefully more able to stay level in the high winds of financial uncertainty, something which the lean and agile VPAC was not the best at.