I'm Looking for a Job

Since finishing up my PhD in Artificial Intelligence in June last year, I've been working with a group of guys on a number of websites with the intent of starting a profitable business. An agreement I made with my girlfriend way back in mid 2008 was that if my ventures were not financially viable or looking like they would be viable soon that I would seek gainful employment in the new year. That time has come. It's a new year and I'm looking for work.

I started some preparation toward the end of last year, contacting and organising professional referees, re-writing my resume in LaTeX, and setting up email alerts for key terms on local job sites. Initially I was unsure of the space of job sites in Australia. I built a small list and checked traffic on Alexa to ensure I wasn't wasting my time. Seek is still the dominant player with an estimated more than double the page views than the next two competitors.

Re-writing my resume forced me to consolidate my research work and more recent entrepreneurial aspirations into a communicable form which I found useful for really fleshing out the core take-aways. For me the PhD was a true apprenticeship in basic research, the scientific method and technical writing. Co-founding a number of website businesses was a crash course in product development and brand management with sprinkles of team coordination.

I condensed my resume and used the content to update my linkedin and facebook profiles in the off-chance that a potential employer does a background check. Like this blog post, I exploited my social networks to broadcast that fact that I'm looking for work using the linkedin and facebook status messages, as well as twitter. Although, unlike those social networking sites, this blog is far less of an advertisement and more a synthesis of ideas.

I've been thinking a lot about the kind of work I want to do. I'm a trained and experienced software engineer and research scientist and so dream jobs fall into the spectrum of programming complex intelligent systems. This observation ties in closely with a post I wrote back in March 2008 entitled "Cycling Hobbies to Day Jobs: A Personal Assessment of Starting a Startup". In that post I made the observation that in the past I had cycled between software engineer and AI researcher and that an ideal job would be to build such systems for a living. I now believe that I'm broadly suited to jobs within the spectrum defined on the boundaries between full time academic and full time software engineer. I am not convinced that jobs in the sweet spot such as 'AI research for development' or 'development of complex intelligent systems' is any better or worse suited than 'research scientist' or 'programmer analyst'. They all effectively exploit the skill set that has been accreted over the last 10 years, and I feel confident that so-called hobby projects can fill in any gaps not covered by a real job.

I still maintain aspirations of building and owning my own business, but I have seen hungry entrepreneurs and I don't think I'm one of them. Socialising and working with some of these guys in Melbourne as highlighted that what I desired from my own startup is the ability to call the shots. What I think I currently lack is the business experience (or perhaps discipline) to map hard work to financial independence. I am also not convinced that a service based business is the way to go. The bulk of my professional, personal, and creative projects have been produce and release. A business, especially a service-based business is focused on maintenance after release, not abandonment.

I attended a handful of interviews in the declining weeks of 2008. The positions where predominately at the edges of my spectrum of interest and the conversations during those interviews really woke me up. Paraphrased: "we're after a career academic, why so few publications? will you teach?" or "we're after a senior developer/team leader, how does your 4 year absence from this profession make you competitive?". Valid questions without a doubt which I addressed, although I can't help but think that being a specialist for the last 10 years and not having to answer such questions would be a better position. Perhaps not. Nevertheless I'm preparing for the long haul.