Re: [Sheflug] re Cambridge (was.. A couple non-technical questions)

[Robert E B Holland BEng CEng FIEE <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 08 September 2002 15:53, you wrote:

> I hope they have some success. I've been totally unable to find a decent
> high tech job in the North. There's a fair bit of MIS, support and web
> work, but that's fairly unrewarding as far as technical stuff goes. In the
> end I decided to move away (Cambridge) where there's more high tech jobs in
> a few square miles than all of Yorkshire combined.

I am inclined to agree with you here. Thanks for confirming what I believed 
to be the case - there are a lot of very experienced people moving away from 
the area for the same reason. We are not concentrating enough on retaining 
the skills we have, but I guess the O1 theory goes that if more people are 
available locally to do the type of work you describe above, then maybe more 
advanced stuff will come along. However, from the comments I received in a 
straw poll of several hundred graduate engineers a couple of years ago I 
personally don't think the answer is building a lot of high tech parks hoping 
to get the 'right sort' of company coming along - from what I remember of my 
contact with the Cambridge area in the late 70s (Acorn, Sinclair et al), the 
science and technology parks etc were a result of - not the precursor to - 
the wealth created by the scientific and engineering community at that time, 
together with the stimulation brought about by having small groups of 
talented people with the drive to bring about change.

Drifting off the Linux thing here a bit - apologies.

Regards
Bob Holland
___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group -
http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.