Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

On the market

Some people will no doubt know this already, but I thought this was worth mentioning here explicitly.

I'm finishing my current job in a couple of months (the 31st of July is my leaving date at the moment), primarily because I feel like it's time for a change - a sysadmin who's fixed more or less all the problems he had to fix rapidly becomes a bored sysadmin. What this means is that after then, I'll need to find some means of paying the rent and keeping myself in geek toys.

What I'd most like to happen is for someone to give me a big pile of money and say "Here! Go away and use your imagination, come up with something cool, pontificate on your website and work out what you want to do when you grow up." Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen, so it looks like I'll be needing a job.

I can do a number of things, which is good, but my primary interests are in UNIX system administration (and by extension FreeBSD and Linux), of which I have about, ooh, a decade or more of experience, as well as in security, hardware, infrastructure and troubleshooting. I particularly love fixing things when they go wrong, or even better, co-ordinating a whole bunch of people to fix things when they go really wrong, and am probably at my happiest when I've got a bunch of tiles up in the machine room and am sitting in the middle of a pile of cables with a screwdriver, a pair of cutters and a roll of gaffer tape.

This leads me to think that I'd be best suited to operational or systems roles with a seriously hands-on technical component. I was even faintly thinking about starting my own one-man company to help with planning and co-ordination of major systems infrastructure work such as machine room moves, which is particularly good as a lot of things like that happen at night and at weekends and I'm not much of a morning person. Combining that with a bit of more general UNIXish consultancy work would probably give me enough to live on quite nicely - the only problem, as always, would be getting started.

I'm happy (well, delighted) to listen to any suggestions, ideas or even job offers people might have - do feel free to have a look at my CV, which is available in PDF and MS Word versions. I'm currently in London and likely to be staying here for the time being, but a certain amount of travel isn't a problem.

Posted by mpk at May 14, 2004 3:52 PM | TrackBack