Cuevano ~ Jorge Aranda

I’m a software developer again

I’m happy to announce that this week I started on my new programming position at Terapeak, a local data-analytics company. I’m especially happy because it satisfies almost all the criteria I was looking for when I set out to find a job [1]. It’s quite a change for me to get out of the university environment after being immersed in it for almost 9 years—a change that I felt was necessary, and one that I was really looking forward to. So I’m no longer an academic. Or I guess you could say I went native: I joined the community that used to be my object of study [2].

I’ve only started at the new place, but I’ve been already learning quite a bit and having lots of fun. I’m also having really satisfying feelings of liberation (getting myself out of the small, ineffectual corner to which my research had been pushing me, as research tends to do), of relevance (knowing that my work will be used and found useful), and of possibility (dusting off skills that will get me closer to where I want to be). These feelings may be possibly in part due to the novelty of the change, and, as always, it’s hard to say how things will turn out. But right now this feels like it was the right choice.

[1] With one exception: it is not an organization working on environmental or social justice issues. But I found none of those hiring folks like me in Victoria. Of course, I’ll continue working on these issues in my free time.

[2] Though I never did research on Terapeak.