Paco´s Life: Madrid

Mercenario del Silicio / IT Mercenary

Well, I finally made it, here we are, stuck into this train heading back from a course I have been teaching in Cartagena and having nothing else to do apart from using my new laptop to produce this new entry for my blog, an entry I owed to him after the last events in my life. As usual, I will continue the story where I left it: Paco the messy was living a bit less uncertain days in which he was committed to give up the list of various and diverse personal projects in order to achieve the precious treasure called stability. June was the date I was marking as the minimum stay period en Madrid and here we are. Aleluya!, we made it, I am still in Madrid but actually I have cheated… it´s been more than a month I have been looking for that thing attracting me so much called “new challenges”. I guess, one always look for perfection and, having a deep analysis of my current professional situation I found out a few things likely to be improved.

In fact, I was not asking for that much, my new job should give me a) more money b) a more international environment c) possibility of using a different technology d) more flexibility e) fuck the tie. At this point, and surprisingly for me, I realized that changing the country was not the main issue here even though I would lie if I would say I was not attracted by that possibility too. I will come back to this in the future, the thing is that there is a small dwarf inside me who thinks I am not done with my living abroad yet and he takes advantage of every occasion to make his point. There is even a more radical one who says working is a pain in the ass and I should save, no matter how, a big amount of money, enough to travel all around the world.

Circumstances have made them both wait for the time been. In this search I have been doing there was certainly possibilities of moving away from Spain: Germany, Utrech (Netherlands), London and even Nigeria, the most weird one I didn’t share with anyone but, for one reason or another, none of this plans went ahead. In most of the cases simply because I didn’t have the experience required. Finally, the Oscar went to Madrid. I will have to start giving more credibility to my stability speech because, in the end, voluntarily or not, I end up staying here. I signed a one year contract to develop software in Java for a Madrid based company.

This, therefore, marks the end of my career at “Oficina de Cooperación Universitaria” so, before talking about the new challenge, it is probably worth it to look back and review this professional experience. Ties and rigid time tables apart, I am pretty satisfied of my 14 months working here. For starting, is my personal professional stability record but, more important, it meant a very positive evolution concerning my professional attitude. I could say that, by the time I got back to Madrid in April 2007, I was nearly a complete useless. Three years grabbing my balls first at Cardiff and then at Stockholm had nearly removed both my concentration ability and my technical knowledge, gained while I was studying. Been focused on a computer eight hours a day doing something that, besides, was extremely boring most of the time, was a real pain and I (and some of you by listening to my complains) have suffered many professional crisis through this period .

After these 14 months I believe this situation has changed. I am not going to say I love working in IT nor that I enjoy 100% of my working time, there are periods in which time goes faster and periods in which this job is still fucking boring but, at least now, I believe I am more efficient in what I am doing, more professional and I even feel happy many times when I see something finished correctly. I have learnt a lot in OUC, in a technical way and also concerning professional attitude and that’s definitely thanks to the people I have been working with. As opposite as it happened in Stockholm, working here has been a great experience I would definitely recommend to anyone.

Why am I leaving then? A few reasons as I said before, first the miss of a more international environment. Since I am no longer an expatriate and became a common “madrileño”, I needed to keep that feeling alive somehow. Almería and Cartagena have been the more far away places I have been sent by OCU and that was not likely to change. The company is what it is and has it business locally. If something I got out of all that time living abroad it was a decent level of English and I wanted to take advantage of that.

Second reason: Money, Money, Money. I spend a lot, there is hole in my pocket since I came back from Stockholm and I have spent all this time paying bills with the credit card next month`s receipt and many times I ended up with red numbers by the end of the month. Well, now I am going to get paid almost twice, hopefully enough to get back to travelling and gain some savings. Most of my life I didn’t have to worry about money so this last year it´s been sort of stressing. The new job is $$$$ and therefore I am

Let`s add as well that I have gained time flexibility and nobody is going to force to wear this uncomfortable piece of silk around my neck and suddenly we can realize we matched all the points listed at the beginning of this entry. So what the hell am I going to be doing? Well, I have started a professional path not too explored by my classmates nor the people I know but very popular among IT European professionals: I am going to be a freelance developer. I will produce my own bills and will not be attached to a particular company but, in theory, I will go from contract to contract, ideal for my stability isn’t it? I have been hired by a London IT consultancy company that places me in a client in Madrid. Funny business this way of hiring, the londiners charge the Madrid client and then pay me. I work in this client´s site but paid by someone else. That probably means the London company is putting a high commission for the client on top of my salary in exchange for just putting an add on Internet and make the first interview. I understand the client does not want to have permanent staff in order to save costs but why don’t they just post the add themselves? Anyway, I don’t really give a flying fuck, with or without the agency commission you get much more money working like than via the usual permanent contract with a regular company. You could make a point of the fact that, in exchange of this better salary, I loose stability and can easily find myself unemployed but, again, I am unstable so this sort of fits me very well…

So, I will be working for an international Italian company with business in Madrid and many other countries in the world. I will be developing in Java in collaboration with company staff located in various places such as UK, Netherlandas, South Africa and Australia. And….yes, good guess, the travelling dwarf inside me is already elaborating plans to make them send me to any of these places. Time will tell if this is possible. For the time been (June 2008), my ass remains in Madrid, no movement in a short therm.

There is still a bunch of other things to talk about but I think this speech got too big and probably nobody kept reading so long neither I feel like writing. One of the things I was aiming with this entry, apart from the usual mental clarification exercise, was to tell about this professional alternative to my class and workmates. If I am not too lazy, I will keep talking about this in future posts and if it ends up been a bullshit you will know. Enough for today then, I leave not before saying this change made me fucking happy, I have got this good vibration telling me I scored a big hit with this. My sentimental life is still a different issue but, my professional life is definitely going well