the best way to get cool work is to create opportunities! Do great work and
make it visible, reach out to businesses. etc
while theres many people on haskell cafe who are happy to try to give
advice, i think we're the wrong group to give advice.
1) reach out to your universities alumni network, there'll be many folks in
many organizations who may be willing to help / give you advice
2) email organizations that are hiring that you're excited by and where you
have some basic fluency in the the skills they need. The fact of the
matter is that for jumpstarting/resuming a career thats been on hiatus,
taking a junior role is the best way to get it started. One good listing
that happens every month is the hacker news who's hiring thread, and they
list many remote ok jobs too!
best of luck
_Carter
On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Dennis Raddle
It's me again, guy aged 45 thinking about doing graduate work in CS.
I read this ebook about a guy's CS PhD, "The PhD Grind":
http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm
It was enlightening. I used to think that software in the C.S. academic world must be well-written, seeing as it was written by computer scientists. (I didn't like the poorly organized and simple-minded code involved in my last job at NASA.) Turns out that academic code can be very poor indeed, sometimes just a hacked prototype meant to demonstrate an idea to get it published. It may be the youngest PhD students who are assigned the job of cranking out such prototypes.
So what do I want to do for my life's work, once I can overcome this illness and get back to work full-time?
I hope I can work with beauty in some form. I find Haskell to be beautiful, for instance. I like ideas, but I also like the process of implementing ideas in a quality way. I may not be suited to the academic world because I need to spend at least some of my time as a craftsman of code, doing something well.
Is there an area with CS academia that is more about elegance, less about hacking up prototypes? The study of languages?
Second, what if I thought of PhD not as a way to enter academia, but as a way to qualify me for the more interesting and creative C.S. jobs out there? What kinds of C.S. jobs involve real creative control, an opportunity to do things in an elegant way?
I know that's a very broad question, so maybe those reading could mention single examples or things they've run into. No need to cover everything.
Thanks, Dennis
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