(no subject)
Inspired by Alice's remarkable socks, I felt like I should put something up to let those who've still haven't given me up for dead know what's been going on here in the 'Burgh.
It's been an interesting time these last couple months. Not that a great deal has happened, really, but it's been an especially nasty job season. Unlike the last couple years of job season bitching, I've actually gotta end up with a new gig of some sort at the end of this one, so the dramatic tension was gonna be turned up a notch anyway. Beyond that, though, I've spent the last couple months kinda watching my astronomy career circling the drain and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.
When I started the Google thing, I had this grand plan that I'd do the Google stuff during the day and do my science thing in the evenings. Most of my best work was done in at night anyway, so I figured this would be a decent way to break things down. What I didn't plan on, however, was that the folks who run Google are much smarter than I am and that they would choose to use some of that brain power to entice their workers to spend longer hours at the office than they might otherwise. Not coercion in any sense, just the natural byproduct of creating an extremely comfortable work environment and having plentiful (free!) snacks nearby. Very quickly, "evening" didn't end up starting until 9 or 10pm and then ending at 1am because I needed to get to the office at a reasonable hour (again, no pressure on this, just something that I came up with on my own). Combine that with the fact that I'm actually working during the day (rather than just websurfing and talking to grad students) and my science output has been next to nothing for the last couple months.
At the same time, while most of the stuff that I'm working on during the day is astronomy-related, it's far enough removed from the sort of thing I was working on science-wise that the actual content doesn't really matter (although, as a weird side-effect of this project, I have learned more hardcore astronomy stuff about astronometry and photometry than I ever did as a working scientist). Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is really more along the lines of computer science. Basically, I've been living the life of a software engineer for the last several months and it seems like my astronomer identity is kinda slipping away. I still know a lot about astronomy, of course, but most of my time is spent wrangling code and trying to ingest a decade's worth of computer science as quickly as possible. The actual last decade of my life was spent trying to become a decent astrophysicist and now, when I should be focusing on things like job talks and finishing up some very promising projects, I don't seem to be spending much time thinking about it.
Like I said, it's a weird sort of thing. It probably says some rather unhealthy things about my relationship to my job that I feel like I've sort of lost track of my identity over the course of the last few months just by virtue of changing offices and work schedules. At the same time, I've managed to make a couple short lists (Fermilab and Brookhaven), so I guess I'll have to figure out exactly what that identity is gonna be over the course of the next couple weeks....
It's been an interesting time these last couple months. Not that a great deal has happened, really, but it's been an especially nasty job season. Unlike the last couple years of job season bitching, I've actually gotta end up with a new gig of some sort at the end of this one, so the dramatic tension was gonna be turned up a notch anyway. Beyond that, though, I've spent the last couple months kinda watching my astronomy career circling the drain and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.
When I started the Google thing, I had this grand plan that I'd do the Google stuff during the day and do my science thing in the evenings. Most of my best work was done in at night anyway, so I figured this would be a decent way to break things down. What I didn't plan on, however, was that the folks who run Google are much smarter than I am and that they would choose to use some of that brain power to entice their workers to spend longer hours at the office than they might otherwise. Not coercion in any sense, just the natural byproduct of creating an extremely comfortable work environment and having plentiful (free!) snacks nearby. Very quickly, "evening" didn't end up starting until 9 or 10pm and then ending at 1am because I needed to get to the office at a reasonable hour (again, no pressure on this, just something that I came up with on my own). Combine that with the fact that I'm actually working during the day (rather than just websurfing and talking to grad students) and my science output has been next to nothing for the last couple months.
At the same time, while most of the stuff that I'm working on during the day is astronomy-related, it's far enough removed from the sort of thing I was working on science-wise that the actual content doesn't really matter (although, as a weird side-effect of this project, I have learned more hardcore astronomy stuff about astronometry and photometry than I ever did as a working scientist). Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is really more along the lines of computer science. Basically, I've been living the life of a software engineer for the last several months and it seems like my astronomer identity is kinda slipping away. I still know a lot about astronomy, of course, but most of my time is spent wrangling code and trying to ingest a decade's worth of computer science as quickly as possible. The actual last decade of my life was spent trying to become a decent astrophysicist and now, when I should be focusing on things like job talks and finishing up some very promising projects, I don't seem to be spending much time thinking about it.
Like I said, it's a weird sort of thing. It probably says some rather unhealthy things about my relationship to my job that I feel like I've sort of lost track of my identity over the course of the last few months just by virtue of changing offices and work schedules. At the same time, I've managed to make a couple short lists (Fermilab and Brookhaven), so I guess I'll have to figure out exactly what that identity is gonna be over the course of the next couple weeks....