Staying in Wellington looking more likely

Well, here's the skinny.

Though I didn’t talk about it until today on this (public) blog, I was unhappy with my old job.  There are many reasons why, but the main one was that I felt like I was being asked to re-arrange deck chairs on the titanic.  There are other examples, but the site was supposed to launch last year, then it was Feb 1, then March 1, then April 1… then a week from April 1…

I wish them the best of luck, but I can’t stand the inaction at that company, as well as the general idea of quantity instead of quality blogging winning the day – I’m essentially being told to tweet stuff when I have no idea what to tweet about – and no one is listening anyway.  All our subscribers were spambots.

This was an unsustainable situation.

So rather than slowly go mad, I had three options.  The first was to start my own business.  I considered this, though I’d rather work to make money than working to find work to make money. Business is not my strong suit, never has been. 

So, the question became: Do I find a new job in Wellington, or find a new job in Austin? 

The “safe bet” at one point, was getting my old job back – but my old supervisor has said that I may not like the new corporate culture there.  I also thought it was unlikely to get a new job in Wellington in a short time.

Unlikely, but not impossible.  I headed to an event called Thursday Night Curry a while back – a meeting for tech heads in Austin who… well, eat curry at an Indian restaurant.  Met a guy there who said that a few companies were always looking for people with my skills, after showing him my resume.  One of those companies was called SilverStripe, a company that heads the open source development of the SilverStripe CMS and then creates the software for large Web sites, using the SilverStripe software.

It turns out, though they didn’t have a listing for a position on their Web site for anyone with my skills, they did need a writer – and needed one badly.  Badly enough that I sent the resume on Thursday night, was asked to come in to an interview sometime next week (which turned out to be Tuesday) and came in for a second interview today (Wednesday) and offered me a position at the end of the day.  It pays about the equivalent of $50k US dollars/yr, and what I was getting before was $35k US.

The good news is that I have a firm job offer in hand.  The bad news – they want an answer by next Wednesday – one week.  I’m still flying back to Texas on April 22nd, but it may be only for a visit. 

I’d like your advice on this, though.  I’m posting this to both my public blog and my private LiveJournal.  Please, if you have any reason I shouldn’t continue this grand New Zealand experiment and give it another go, please let me know now, because I don’t have much time to pussyfoot around on this.  I wish I did, but I simply do not. 

Oh, one other thing.  SilverStripe is pretty much 50% immigrants.  The CEO is another Bush refugee – from 2003, and from SF.  My direct supervisor there would be a British emigre who left because of Thatcher.  If I’m going to find people going through what I’m going through… that’s pretty much the place to find ‘em.