vortex’s blog

Working for a semi-government owned software development company has been everything I’d hoped it would be; until now..

I currently work at Education.au who are a company that is jointly owned by the Australian Federal Government and the State Governments; that is great in some aspects, for one; Federal Government Grant money is always flowing to keep the various government projects we work on running, but we’ve just seen the down side. Australia has recently changed from a Liberal / Coalition government to a Labor government, and they have seen fit to ‘reallocate’ some of the funds previously allocated by the Liberal government. There is an organization who were receiving a large, multi-million dollar sum of money to facilitate a number of programs aimed at improving education in the Higher Education sector in Australia - one of these initiatives was a Social Networking site built on Drupal aimed at Lecturers and Academics to allow them to communicate in their expertise areas with other like-minded and like-skilled people; Education.au was tasked to build it. I work on this project as a PHP developer, and also in the team are two other PHP developers, a CSM, two BA’s, a PM and Project Officer. In the ‘reallocation’ of the budget dollars, 1/3rd of their budget was slashed. Something had to go, so what they cut was the next stage of work which would have easily kept us going for the next 12 months.

We have remaining work from the current stage which will keep us busy until April or May; my 12 month contract is due for renewal in July.

There are other Drupal projects internally in the company, however they don’t seem to be as well run from what I can tell and definantly don’t have the financial backing of my current project (hence why they have tighter timelines). Plus, there’s only so much Drupal one can write before going completely bonkers!
I have known the news of the budget cuts for a few days now, however it’s only just sinking in. Initially it didnt hit me that hard, but I think it started to sink in a little more today when I heard other members of the team were already considering their options elsewhere.

This has now also made me consider my options; I currently live in Adelaide which is a great place to live - but a crap place to be a PHP developer who’s into high end Object Oriented PHP5. In this city of 1.1 million we have very few truly professional software houses that do much with PHP5, the majority of places using PHP are ‘owner-operated’ companies that don’t get the quality of client I want to work with.

Having worked in a number of ‘owner-operated’ companies before, I choose to never work in a small company again. These kinds of companies are not able to pay the wage I’m after, and the owners can be a pain to get along with. That limits my options severely in Adelaide; if I want to get into a well paying job for a OOP PHP5 expert, I’ll have to move interstate. My options there are:

Melbourne:
+ Close to Adelaide, 8 hrs drive, 45min flight, flights often $60aud one way.
+ Larger population - 3.8 million, Diversity of activities, better quality of activities
+ Real city, Not a sleepy country town
+ AFL State (Not that I watch it much, I just REALLY dislike Rugby League)
+ Public Transport rules
+ Road system rules
+ Lots of PHP work.
+ Have Friends in Melbourne and near Melbourne already
- More Expensive than Adelaide.
- Temperamental weather

Brisbane:
+ Great Weather!
+ More Sunshine
+ Larger population 1.8 million, Diversity of activities, better quality of activities
+ Real city, Not a sleepy country town
+ Lots of PHP work
+ Cousin lives in Brisbane at the moment.
- NRL State (Rugby annoys me!)
- Further from Adelaide, 4 hour flight, ~3 day drive
- More Expensive than Adelaide

One major problem I have is our house is currently a *mess*. It is undergoing renovations at the moment which means it cannot be rented or sold as it currently stands. The only feasible way to make it work would be for Melissa (my partner) to stay in Adelaide in the mean time while the renovations are happening; and I’d have to rent a room while in Brisbane or Melbourne while still paying my share of Mortgage payments on the house in Adelaide. Melissa would need to stay here as well at the moment for family reasons as well as her work and study; she’s currently working toward an MCSE certification with her work. That’s important for her future job prospects, as much as we both prefer using Linux She’s on track to be promoted at her work in the near future and probably once the MCSE is completed.

This is all complicated by the fact that I’m currently doing a degree part time external (Bachelor of Computer and Information Science). Not a huge thing, I’ll be able to swap to what ever the local Uni is whereever I go to more than likely - not that i’ll actually even need to anyway because the course is external. I may have to fly home for exams, if I was unable to organize an exam in that city. Its probably not a huge concern; but a concern none the less.

Another concern is my Racing. I want to continue to race Karts where ever I go, both Brisbane and Melbourne have large kart racing scenes so that’s not a huge issue. Karters are good people in general so I’ll be able to get a hand loading & unloading the kart if needed where ever I go, more than likely. My equipment is such that I’ll be able to do almost everything on my own - and clutches are compulsory in 2009 anyway so I could put one on sooner rather than later so I don’t have to push start myself.

I would more than likely have to leave my Mazda RX7 here in Adelaide until Mel was able to move over as well; at that point in time it would depend weather we were buying a house in whatever city I was to move to so we would have a place to store it. Failing that, I could store it at a family members house in Adelaide if needed. I do not want to sell it; I picked it up for a fair bargain price and it’s a great car. I would likely take my Holden Commodore with me to whichever city I was able to find work in right from the beginning; but I’d likely purchase a 50cc scooter to ride around the City, to/from work.

So, anyway, thats enough of a brain dump. Figured it cant hurt to dump my thoughts out in electronic form to help me get them straight in my head. I hope everything turns out well at work, and perhaps I wont need to move in the end anyway. Moving to Melbourne is something I’ve wanted to do since about 1996 when I went there for the first time. Moving to Brisbane is something I’ve thought about more than once and each time I’ve been there I’ve come back wanting to live there. Probably explains why everyone is moving there!

I’ve chosen not to tag this with PHP, as it will display on planet-php.org if I do. Its too much of a personal rant to display on that site; even though portions of it are about PHP.