Freesteel Blog » Welcome to your new adventure

Welcome to your new adventure

Saturday, October 13th, 2012 at 9:51 am Written by:

I took this picture of a wall within the Copenhagen Rathouse during culture night when all the interesting buildings in the city were open and the streets were packed with badge-wearers. It’s of two gold plated walrus skulls from Greenland with a shield in the top right depicting hot sun and palm trees representing the little known Danish West Indies. The nation must have liked that tropical holiday home. One of the venues we went to had a rock band from Greenland called “Copy Paste”. We didn’t stay long.

After 10 years of glorious freedom, having sworn never again to seek employment or allow my self-made code to become capital to which I have no independent right of access, my world was turned upside down. Did we sell out? Yes we did!. And it wasn’t for the money.

Martin and I left London for Denmark in a hurry by train last Monday to be with the HSMWorks team during the kick-off. (Just what the hell do we do now?) Unfortunately the following week is school half term, so we’re having a spot of bother trying to get a train or ferry ticket for the return home. For an organization that spins a good yarn on reducing its carbon footprint, Autodesk makes it jolly easy to book air travel through an on-line system that can do nothing else. It’s as useless as an office policy that everybody should eat more healthy fruit and vegetables and then installing a rack of free vending machines in the front lobby dispensing only candy bars and saying if you want a banana you might find a supermarket in the shopping mall a couple of miles down the road.

Right now I am coming up on the other side of the brief episode of depression which followed my signing of a contract that fits exactly with the utterly outrageous industry standard programmer’s employment conditions. After my experiences with the ScraperWiki investment process, I have gotten over the bar of scribbling my signature on anything that relates to signing my life away. None of it matters; you’ll die eventually. Losing the code was the hard part because it represents a more permanent and irreversible situation. Now that I have been let loose onto the company intranet, I can see there is a lot of work to do. There are yawning information gaps everywhere. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a system for asking questions inside the company that worked like an internal Freedom of Information request? I wonder if it would be legitimate to implement it by hand on one of the corporate wiki pages. That’s a crazy idea.

Here’s a crazier one: Is it possible to ask questions of the company from the position of an outsider so that it is legitimate to blog about them? Questions like: “There’s this here lobbying disclosure on patent reform. Which side are we on exactly?”

3 Comments

  • 1. Martin Callaway replies at 17th October 2012, 3:15 pm :

    > And it wasn’t for the money.

    Julian: If its not about money and you don’t sound that happy about working for AutoDesk what is it about?

    Do you believe what Tom Mortensen wrote

    “We sold out because we were offered a unique opportunity to significantly influence the future of CAM – the very reason we started HSMWorks to begin with.”

    Martin.

  • 2. Julian replies at 19th October 2012, 10:09 am :

    Well, it wouldn’t be cool to be happy. It could be a dream job, but you can’t jump to conclusions. Nothing so far contradicts what Mortensen wrote or promised me.

  • 3. Freesteel&hellip replies at 16th October 2013, 6:02 pm :

    […] hit the culture night last Friday on our approximately annual working visit to Copenhagen. With only a program in Danish to guide us, it was a bit hit and miss. Mostly miss. […]

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