job hunt: chaos!

It's a bit after midnight right now. The alarm goes off at 4:45 AM so we can get to the Saturday sangha program, but it has been a crazy week and I am all wound up, even after 35 minutes of zazen (which I'll do again after I write this). I skipped sitting this morning, otherwise I might have better noticed how active my mind has been, and I might have decided against that iced mocha in between interviews this afternoon.

Here's my week. Bear in mind that for any interview stuff, I spend a day or two getting ready, instead of reading or doing whatever I'd like to do. And the interview really breaks up the day, because I don't want to be distracted by running errands beforehand, and I usually need to decompress afterward.

Monday

• Interview in SF.
• Give my dharma talk.

Tuesday

• Phone call about the sudden new opportunity of Mountain View #2.

Wednesday

• Job offer from San Francisco. Recruiter gets all snippy at me when I don't accept immediately. I have a negative emotional reaction to the recruiter, and try not to transfer it to the company.
• Casual interview with a couple of the tech guys at MV #2, to see which of 2 jobs I should be applying for. Didn't realize this would count as an interview, really.

Thursday

• Free! Except for prepping for Friday's interviews. I went to my favorite bar, did a little reading, but mostly had a couple drinks and hung out with some nice geeks from Electronic Arts.
• Discover, with tremendous surprise, that there are a couple decent duplexes, at reasonable prices, in a neighborhood where I would actually want to live, and the mortgage payment could be 60% of the rent we're looking to pay (and the rents would pretty much cover that). The idea of buying a house in the midst of all this other life change, let alone being a landlord, is insane. And yet. And yet. Things will settle a bit once I have a job, and then...

Friday

• Interview at Mountain View #1, 10 AM - 1:30 PM, then chat with the hiring manager for a bit.
• Meet the founder/CTO and VP of Engineering for Mountain View #2.

The round today with MV #1 went very well, and I know the boss wants to hire me, so I'm expecting at least a verbal offer on Monday.

I met with the MV #2 higher-ups today to clear up exactly what job they want me for, and unfortunately, it sounds pretty awesome. Exactly the sort of situation I'd been planning to look for, in fact, though not necessarily right now, when my technical skill is still coming out of hibernation. But apparently, here it is! Now I have to deal with it. I'm interviewing with 3 final people on Monday, and then they'll let me know quickly. (And, with great gratitude, that should be my last job interview for this job hunt.)

One bit of clarity I've come to is that I will decline San Francisco if MV #1 or MV #2 makes me an offer. Deciding between the two Mountain View jobs would be a good--phenomenal, really--problem to have, but very difficult. I'll lay out the pros and cons in another post.

I am mentally exhausted. A morning of Zen stuff is exactly what I need.

decompression in 3...2...1...

I'm in La Serena, a coastal-ish town (about 2km up the Rio Elqui from where it hits the ocean) 7 hours north of Valparaiso. It's desert up here, which somehow slipped my mind. I don't really care for the desert. Some people love it; I only visit when I need sensory deprivation. It's not super-interesting. The desert here looks more or less like the desert in California, Baja California, and Mexico. It seems to lack the dramatic geology of the deserts in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, but there's still that theme of rocks, cactus, tumbleweed, brutal sunlight, and not much else. I'm not a visually-stimulated person and I hate sunlight, so, yeah. Not a desert rat.

I'd thought about going to Valle del Elqui, which is the vineyard-laden center of pisco production. Then I thought about what exactly I came here to do, which is roughly "nothing" in the form of "eat food, drink coffee, and read books and the Internet," and discovered that in fact I don't care about seeing Valle del Elqui very much. I saw some pictures. It looks like a moonscape with vineyards. Not really my thing.

Having reminded myself that I don't actually want to do anything, I'm...relaxing. Decompressing, starting gently to understand what's happened the past 8 months. I think the time spent teaching was forging and quenching: you apply heat and pressure to your work, shape it with your hammer, then suddenly you sink in it water, cooling it so quickly that the crystal structure changes suddenly, leaving the steel extremely hard, but brittle.

After quenching, you temper the work, which is actually making it less hard and brittle, giving it some flexible toughness so it can absorb shocks. Heat the steel slowly so the parts you want to soften heat up first, to a certain temperature (in blacksmithing, judged by color), and then quench it again. Done by experienced hands, it's an intuitive but fairly precise process.

Anyway, to get out of geek mode: I've done the forging and quenching. Now I'm relaxing and starting the tempering.

Shouldn't take more than a couple decades, I'd think.