Joined Up Typing

I have been freelancing for the past year and was getting on okay, but in July I stumbled across a job advert that spiked my curiosity. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I applied for the job, got an interview, trialed - part time over 2 months and started full-time again in October. I am now helping to build an army of robots to take over the world*

With freelancing, I had got into a nice state where I could get up when I want, walk to the office in my slippers - and pants if I wanted - and do some interesting things with (mostly) good clients, so what was I doing going back to full-time grind???

Well, it’s been nearly 2 months back in full-time PAYE and I can say, this is one of my better decisions. I am now part of a team building robots which is brilliant. (*Even better, the robots are not supposed to take over the world, so we should not end up in any nasty sci-fi moral pastiche of a scenario because we are building stuff for science, education and entertainment. ) The upsides of the job far outweigh the downsides of having to get up Monday - Friday for 9am. I think this is good for me as it is instilling me with a bit of discipline and also ensuring I keep fit by cycling to work a few of those days.

The best bits are:

The stuff we do brings together everything I have “trained” to do - programming, control-systems, sound, 3D, visuals, probably even some electronics, soldering and maybe some mechanical engineering at some point too. So, as my girlfriend pointed out, I am “as happy as a pig in sh**”..

The people I work with are all really interesting and my boss is great too! It’s really good to be in an environment with people who have diverse skill sets - you learn loads from just talking and we all seem to get on really well. This is possibly the first job I have had where everyone at the workshop sits down for lunch - there are only a handful of us, but it’s a brilliantly simple idea and I think it makes a huge difference to the workplace. In previous jobs, we used to play games together - computer and sport - around break/end of work time and again, I think this is a really good way of getting the team together. B****x to expensive team building weekends away, just sit them all down for lunch, outside if the weather is nice.

I don’t have to deal with clients - don’t get me wrong, all my clients are nice people and even though I like dealing with people, running the admin and money side of the business has an effect on the relationship, sometimes a detrimental one as I have found out this year. I still get to talk to the customers who buy the stuff from us, but this is more of a supporting role, which is easier to deal with as it’s separated from the money. I also get to speak to people from other countries as we are dealing outside the UK most of the time, so this is a really good opportunity to find out about stuff in the big wide world.

With my freelance work and previous jobs, I have felt that I have often been ticking over, not pushed and often heading in the wrong direction with the kind of work I am doing. For a few years now, I have been aiming to only do Flash based work rather than websites as a whole, but this has been difficult to acheive - especially in Cornwall as decent coders are hard to find. Now I am doing about 60% Flash stuff, but I have found that this is enough because I realised that it was not being challenged that was the problem - I am challenged once more: Since starting I have had to work with AS1, 2 & 3 code, work with Flash for Linux, Web & PDA’s uncovering all sorts of problems. Not only that, but I have been having to get my hands dirty with Linux once more in setting up version control, backups, disk-cloning and other little housekeeping jobs. I liken Linux to being given entrance to a scrapyard with one person working there - very difficult to find that person for help - and being given a huge choice of bits to choose from, which you have to extract from the other scrap yourself not knowing if it will work when you get it home or if you have to return to the scrapyard several times to achieve your goal.  I have returned to the scrapyard many times, but I am learning to fend for myself once more…

I have also been expected to get to grips with Blender 3D, which has been really cool to do.  We use it for animating the robots, which start to look amazing when you get a sequence working going. Blender is a great free tool, but we are having problems with interfacing to the robot, hence my challenge today was to learn some Python & find workarounds.  By the end of the day, I had acheived measurable results, although Blender’s scripting editor buffer system is going to drive me up the wall. I can’t just edit, save and go, I have to do some stupid computer backflips because the buffers are in RAM and the files on disk & Blender reads the files, blah, blah, blah, poor design…  And, if I press CTRL+Z again I may scream whilst Blender dies it’s quick death - good job it starts faster than any other program I have…

I have a todo list that grows and shrinks more than a buskers’ squeezebox, but this is a good thing because I constantly have new challenges.  Also, having some structure to my working day is good - I can leave the office at 5:30 and forget about work if I want, this is not easy with freelance and whilst I sometimes feel I can do my best work at night, I can’t do 9-5:30, then 8-12 for much longer!  Now all I have to do is finish off the last few freelance projects and I can start exploring some of my stuff again

Finally, I have recently begun to be very disillusioned with web-design as a business, some days it seems like the internet is a big smoke and mirrors operation for marketeers selling bull**** dreams, other days, I feel that clients don’t realise that they hire web-designers & coders for their expertise and often won’t/don’t listen advice provided by these experts, so no wonder I get annoyed with it, whereas in my new job I feel very much valued for my knowledge, but also realise there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don’t know - good job the others do because I can learn a lot from them all.

So, I am right where I want to be largely due to a huge chunk of luck seeing the advert for a job only 2 miles up the road! My boss mentioned the other day that he felt he was in a very privileged position doing what he does with the job / company and I would totally agree with him. It’s nice to feel like I have finally arrived in a job that was made for me and I relish the opportunity to do it well!  Thanks to Nick for telling me to go for it, my boss for giving me the opportunity & the other people who I work with for reminding me that working with others can be great!