IT Matters, Political Matters, Linguistic Matters

[tcpip]

Recently a meeting with an early career person earlier this week on their future career in IT - and it became a 'blog post on careers and purpose in its own right. For my own part going to IT was a career change some fifteen years ago from politics, and with a short transition period. As evident, it seems that one doesn't really leave a subject they are passionate about - life just gets more complex. Continuing the passion and profession synthesis, next Tuesday I'll be speaking at Linux Users of Victoria on OpenStack and the Barcelona Open Stack Summit. Following a similar theme have also made a good start on my talk for Multicore World on HPC/cloud hybrids. Slight hiccup of the week; whilst turning off the compute nodes for Edward a tech pulled the cable for the head node as well, just after a "please move your data" email went out - oops.

There's nothing like the election of a disruptive and destructive leader to get people motivated in politics. There's been multiple 'blog posts relating to Lord Dampnut in the past week on the Isocracy Network, including my own summary of his activities, The Shambling Mound's Second Week. Part of this weekend will be spent preparing material for the Isocracy Labor-Green Alliance strategy meeting (FB) next Friday. Whilst not usually a political organisation, the RPG Review Cooperative has agreed to respond to PETA's insane complaint over Warhammer 40K characters wearing fur.

Having completed the skill trees on Duolingo in the past year for Esperanto, French, German, and Spanish, I have found the daily challenge is keeping them all lessons at "gold" status. Most recently, whilst keeping such a level, I've decided to take more "offline" lessons on those languages via texbook learning to give a more conversational grasp of the languages, something with Duolingo is not good at. Nevertheless will also continue the extensive learning via that medium of Russian, and Mandarin on Memrise. The new month also reminds me that it is time re-establish my interests in the "Scandinavian languages", partially in preparation for ISC and subsequent journeys afterwards, but also to extend my grasp of Germanic linguistics.

Comments

[darjeeling]

You are a linguistics machine, to keep up with all of those!

[tcpip]

For a long time I had a lay interest in linguistics more than languages themselves. At last I'm really beginning to look it all in a more considered manner.

[garote]

I'd comment on that careers blog post directly, but I can't seem to find a way to make an account. So:

I'd like to leaven that jaded view of career choice - do what pays the bills because what you love might not - with this additional advice:

If you are clever - if you search thoroughly, within and without - you may find a way to parlay a set of skills you have but are not passionate about into a work environment where you can pursue a passion that you are not qualified enough to be paid for directly.

This plays especially well with IT and computing skills.

My first example: I had an interest in astrogeology (study of geology on other planets), and so I got a job as a developer at an educational software company that was assembling a multi-year CDROM-based course using materials from NASA and SETI.

Second example: While I was developing the CDROM stuff I realized I had an interest in UI design and data analysis. My next job at Apple - as a test and build engineer - allowed me to explore those things thoroughly.

Third example: Then I got interested in biology. There's no way I'd be employable as a biologist, but I found a job at JBEI developing visualization tools for experiment data. That allowed me to binge on microbiology, while leveraging the UI design and statistics knowledge. I don't think I'll ever get the credentials to be paid as a biologist, but there are labs all over the world that would happily hire me to spruce up their toolsets if I wanted to keep pursuing that. Instead, after taking Google Maps thoroughly apart in order to learn how to implement a metabolic network browser in a web engine ( https://public-arrowland.jbei.org ) , I've discovered that I now have an interest in mapping.

I could pursue that any number of places. Being able to recognize where your interests and your skills intersect, and sniffing those opportunities out, is very worthwhile, and you'll probably have to do it more than once. "Do what you love" is not terrible advice. It is an ongoing mission.

[tcpip]

>"Do what you love" is not terrible advice. It is an ongoing mission.<

Certainly if you can reach the point where pay and aptitude no longer matters, go for it.