Ben Humphreys

I Quit My Job

Just over a week ago I quit my job.

It’s not quite sunk in yet, but I want to write some reflections on the last 2 years that I spent working there, and what I plan to do next.

It was my first job straight out of university, and I was a programmer at a financial company. I dealt with financial data from various sources, processing it with Perl and importing it into our databases.

Overall the job was extremely Nice. Everyone was a pleasure to work with, the hours were good for Japan, the pay was great, the working environment was OK. The company has a very high retention rate, and I can see how it’s possible to keep working there for a long time.

The work itself was OK too, I was given free reign in how to solve the problems, I tried new techniques like test-driven development and people were very supportive.

I learned some skills I never thought I’d learn or to be honest, want to learn. I can now use Vim, and write DCL and Perl way better than I’d ever want to.

So in summary it was all very nice.

However, I came to realise that no matter how good the working conditions - hours, pay, etc. The thing that I really wanted was to be passionate about my work, to take pride in the things I created.

I wanted to be able to say to anybody “Hell yeah I work at this company, I get to make awesome stuff.” Irrespective of whether they think it’s cool or not, I want to think it’s cool.

It’s cheesy but I’m conscious I only get one go at life. If I’d wanted to stick with nice then I could have stayed in the UK.

Maybe it’s a case of “grass is greener” and there are programmers reading this who make “cool” stuff but would kill for a 9-5 well-paid job. But that’s how I feel at the moment.

So what next?

I said before I wanted to do something that I really care about. When I started learning Korean seriously last year, I looked into a subject called “Linguistics” that I’d heard of but had initially put into the Fluffy Humanities pile, along with English Literature and Biology (take that, biologists!).

The more I learned the more it seemed like actual science, with rules and stuff that even looked like programming.

To cut a long story short, if all goes well, from April next year I’ll be pursuing a PhD in Computational Linguistics here in Japan.

I’ll write more about this in the future, my reasons for doing it aren’t as off-hand as above but I don’t want to get into it now.

Until April I have 5 or so months off to take a breather and do the things I enjoy. I came straight from high school to university to a job without a break, so I think a few months off won’t kill me. I’m going to study Korean as much as I can, as well as get back into understanding the mathematics and theory behind computational linguistics and machine learning. Maybe take a road trip or something.