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Jun. 10th, 2003 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Questions from
ewx:
1. Why did you take the job with Zeus, way back when?
I must admit I didn't give myself a lot of choice. I only got round to sending off two CVs: one to a web consultancy in London (where MBM worked at the time and where Pete Clay started a few months later), and the other to Zeus. Both were friendly, but the London interview was a few guys sitting round a table and a brief trip to the pub, practically waving me in on the strength of my CV, while the Zeus one felt altogether more professional and it seemed they really did want to challenge interviewees. Zeus also seemed to be much more stable and established (well, hindsight ... although I think if they'd kept to not too much above the size they were when I joined then they might have ridden out the market crash more gracefully). As an increasingly poor third year student rapidly running out of patience with academia, they seemed to offer a very appealing change.
Of course, this just reduces the question to "why did you apply to Zeus, way back when?" :-) I'd like to say that I carefully looked through all the options available to me and made an informed choice, but I'm not sure that's true. I remember wandering around careers fairs looking for interesting companies that I thought I was qualified for. Since I'd specialized in the more theoretical courses at university there weren't many obvious direct applications of those, so I fell back on my own interests, and I'd been spending a lot of my casual programming time immersed in Unix and Internet protocol work. At the time, Zeus was one of the few local Unix development houses that bothered to show up to careers fairs, and I reckoned I could make a good stab at the subject matter.
I occasionally wonder if I should've applied for nCipher back in the day rather than later; they were one of the other interesting companies I noticed, but I decided that I didn't have solid enough crypto knowledge to apply, which I'm not sure was the right decision. That said, if you discount the gloom caused by the market crash and my occasional rants about doing benchmarking work, Zeus were a fantastic company to work for, and I still think their output was excellent, plus the Perl runner was by far the most interesting development project I've had to date. I think I probably got the sequence more or less right.
2. First impressions matter - or reserve judgement for a bit?
So far all my relationships have been with people I was attracted to right from the start (and usually started not long after I met them, either, although that depends on opportunity ...). To a lesser extent, most of my good friends throughout my life have been people I liked from the word go. It's not often that I find myself getting on well with somebody who drove me up the wall at first. Similarly, I haven't often been wrong when I decided first off that I liked somebody. I'd have to say that first impressions matter.
Of course, this may be self-fulfilling: I think I'm generally predisposed to like people, and perhaps having a not-overly-suspicious attitude makes it more likely that people will live up to expectations. Conversely, if I decide I don't like somebody then there's usually a damn good reason.
3. Flowers or sunsets: you can't have both. Which do you keep?
I seem to be mowing flowers down with my LAWNMOWER OF MIGHT (i.e. "I might mow the lawn this weekend") around this time of year, and I can never remember what half of them are called anyway, so it'll have to be sunsets. Even when I'm unlucky enough to be driving west in the evening and they're shining straight into my eyes, they're still spectacular. Every sunset seems to have a poem waiting to be written about it.
Plus, sunsets are rarer, so they must be better, right?
4. Supposing you had children, what might they be called?
Assuming that the mother had no say in it, you mean? :-) If it were up to me, probably something Irish, although using a reasonably Anglicized spelling so that the poor kids wouldn't spend their whole lives saying to people "no, not Rory, R-U-A-I-R-I" or whatever (maybe things like Seamus or Niamh wouldn't be too bad). My sister picked Finn for her first child, which I like. Maybe: Aidan, Ciaran, Aisling, Fiona.
My parents used some of their parents' names as middle names, which I think is a nice tradition, so David and Bridget/Bridie/some-other-form might make their way in there too.
5. What would it take to make you move away from Cambridge? (AFAICT you're not fed up with the place and looking for an escape route...)
Indeed I'm not, no. I think it would have to take a critical mass of my friends living somewhere else; the main reason I like Cambridge is because I know so many good people here, and right now I don't fancy starting over again somewhere else. Money probably wouldn't cut it ... well, I'm sure I do have my price, but since I've been in the pleasant position of happily living within my means for some time now it's unlikely to be in the few-tens-of-thousands range, and anything more than that is wildly implausible. Oh, and somebody would have to shift all my stuff for me - there are few things I hate more than moving house.
The other possibility is that in some large number of years I decide I'm fed up with this civilization lark and retire to a cottage somewhere back in Ireland (oh, a network-connected cottage, naturally, but I suspect that won't be difficult in the later part of this century ...). I still think of Ireland, and certainly Northern Ireland, in large part as home, and it feels weird that I haven't been back there in three years. I'm not sure yet that I'd ever want to live there permanently, since I've spent all my adult life in England and have built up quite a base here, but I'm prepared to believe that that might change in time.
I'm turning up late to this meme, but I enjoyed that. Anyone want five questions from me?
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1. Why did you take the job with Zeus, way back when?
I must admit I didn't give myself a lot of choice. I only got round to sending off two CVs: one to a web consultancy in London (where MBM worked at the time and where Pete Clay started a few months later), and the other to Zeus. Both were friendly, but the London interview was a few guys sitting round a table and a brief trip to the pub, practically waving me in on the strength of my CV, while the Zeus one felt altogether more professional and it seemed they really did want to challenge interviewees. Zeus also seemed to be much more stable and established (well, hindsight ... although I think if they'd kept to not too much above the size they were when I joined then they might have ridden out the market crash more gracefully). As an increasingly poor third year student rapidly running out of patience with academia, they seemed to offer a very appealing change.
Of course, this just reduces the question to "why did you apply to Zeus, way back when?" :-) I'd like to say that I carefully looked through all the options available to me and made an informed choice, but I'm not sure that's true. I remember wandering around careers fairs looking for interesting companies that I thought I was qualified for. Since I'd specialized in the more theoretical courses at university there weren't many obvious direct applications of those, so I fell back on my own interests, and I'd been spending a lot of my casual programming time immersed in Unix and Internet protocol work. At the time, Zeus was one of the few local Unix development houses that bothered to show up to careers fairs, and I reckoned I could make a good stab at the subject matter.
I occasionally wonder if I should've applied for nCipher back in the day rather than later; they were one of the other interesting companies I noticed, but I decided that I didn't have solid enough crypto knowledge to apply, which I'm not sure was the right decision. That said, if you discount the gloom caused by the market crash and my occasional rants about doing benchmarking work, Zeus were a fantastic company to work for, and I still think their output was excellent, plus the Perl runner was by far the most interesting development project I've had to date. I think I probably got the sequence more or less right.
2. First impressions matter - or reserve judgement for a bit?
So far all my relationships have been with people I was attracted to right from the start (and usually started not long after I met them, either, although that depends on opportunity ...). To a lesser extent, most of my good friends throughout my life have been people I liked from the word go. It's not often that I find myself getting on well with somebody who drove me up the wall at first. Similarly, I haven't often been wrong when I decided first off that I liked somebody. I'd have to say that first impressions matter.
Of course, this may be self-fulfilling: I think I'm generally predisposed to like people, and perhaps having a not-overly-suspicious attitude makes it more likely that people will live up to expectations. Conversely, if I decide I don't like somebody then there's usually a damn good reason.
3. Flowers or sunsets: you can't have both. Which do you keep?
I seem to be mowing flowers down with my LAWNMOWER OF MIGHT (i.e. "I might mow the lawn this weekend") around this time of year, and I can never remember what half of them are called anyway, so it'll have to be sunsets. Even when I'm unlucky enough to be driving west in the evening and they're shining straight into my eyes, they're still spectacular. Every sunset seems to have a poem waiting to be written about it.
Plus, sunsets are rarer, so they must be better, right?
4. Supposing you had children, what might they be called?
Assuming that the mother had no say in it, you mean? :-) If it were up to me, probably something Irish, although using a reasonably Anglicized spelling so that the poor kids wouldn't spend their whole lives saying to people "no, not Rory, R-U-A-I-R-I" or whatever (maybe things like Seamus or Niamh wouldn't be too bad). My sister picked Finn for her first child, which I like. Maybe: Aidan, Ciaran, Aisling, Fiona.
My parents used some of their parents' names as middle names, which I think is a nice tradition, so David and Bridget/Bridie/some-other-form might make their way in there too.
5. What would it take to make you move away from Cambridge? (AFAICT you're not fed up with the place and looking for an escape route...)
Indeed I'm not, no. I think it would have to take a critical mass of my friends living somewhere else; the main reason I like Cambridge is because I know so many good people here, and right now I don't fancy starting over again somewhere else. Money probably wouldn't cut it ... well, I'm sure I do have my price, but since I've been in the pleasant position of happily living within my means for some time now it's unlikely to be in the few-tens-of-thousands range, and anything more than that is wildly implausible. Oh, and somebody would have to shift all my stuff for me - there are few things I hate more than moving house.
The other possibility is that in some large number of years I decide I'm fed up with this civilization lark and retire to a cottage somewhere back in Ireland (oh, a network-connected cottage, naturally, but I suspect that won't be difficult in the later part of this century ...). I still think of Ireland, and certainly Northern Ireland, in large part as home, and it feels weird that I haven't been back there in three years. I'm not sure yet that I'd ever want to live there permanently, since I've spent all my adult life in England and have built up quite a base here, but I'm prepared to believe that that might change in time.
I'm turning up late to this meme, but I enjoyed that. Anyone want five questions from me?