Something Of Moderate Size And Importance Is Happening

My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into LinkedIn and started networking.

Going only by the strength of my notifications, the world was whipsawing back and forth between the thrill of revolutionary new discovery and the gloom of the imminent devastation of everything we hold dear. It was the best of times to look for a job; it was the worst of times to be a young professional. It was the age of unbounded wisdom at our fingertips; it was the age of foolishness subverting our best intentions. It was the epoch of belief in the arrival of a higher power; it was the epoch of incredulity at the credulous fascination with tawdry tricks. It was the season of the dawn of a new Light; it was the season of fall into a hitherto unknown Darkness. It was the spring of hope and change; it was the winter of despair and rapine. We had everything before us to discover, we had nothing before us to ever do again, we were all going direct to the Heaven of plenty, we were all going direct to the Hell of plunder. In short, the period was so much like Dickensian London that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

After a large number of applications and a small number of interviews, I found myself with a job offer at a large, relatively benign local company. And in the latter part of last year, I began a new career as an AI Scientist.