This story starts a few years back…

Barclays Days

I was working @ Barclays Capital in New York a few years back. During that effort, Shannon (my lovely wife) and I talked about the idea of going to live in London for a spell.  Both Shannon and I had been to the UK and thought that at some point – it would be something we would like to do. This was in the ~2005 time frame. After I decided to leave my consulting firm, I talked to the folks at Barclays about taking a job even – but the role was not a fit for me… so I moved along.

Life goes on to MER

Life went on, Gabe and Micah got bigger we were living in Brooklyn – life was good. When I had 1st started at Merrill Lynch, I mentioned to my boss that I was interested in eventually coming from NY to London. At the time I also had the (false) understanding that I had an easy immigration path to the UK due to a (false) assumption about my dad. In any case – I planted the seed then.

In January of 2008 – I was in London on a trip with Merrill. I had talks with some key people and they told me I could come to in London with the family in ~the summer time-frame. The banking industry has been in some dismay this year – so there were some back and forths, pauses and such – but they eventually gave me dates and other nods and yesses.

Surprise … Job Change

A friend of mine in the neighborhood asked me out for coffee one afternoon. He was working at a hedge fund here in NY. I brought the boys, we went to the park and chatted while the kids played. He was hinting at trying to convince me to come have a talk with the people at this fund. I said I was not leaving MER. I said that my project was en-route, and that we were relocating to the UK. He smiled and nodded and we left our coffee chat.

A few weeks later, my friend contacted me again and said that London was an option for that job. My project was close to going out at MER, and after some convincing – he asked me to ‘come see the fund for one afternoon’. So – I put on my nicest suit and went for a day of interviews. After the better part of a day of video conference and in person interviews with the people from the relevant desks – and a few phone calls – I was done. It went well. They liked me, I liked them, etc. We talked about the job and about relocation. I accepted the job.

The Process

From there it was paperwork. We had to get me a UK Work Permit. I had to get a “UK work permit holder visa”. We had to get the family “UK work permit dependent visas”. This was all paperwork that had to be done, some I did, some people at the office did, some outside legal council did. I would say that it was not so easy or fun, but completely doable. Apparently there are all sorts of work visa changes happening in the UK as of October 2008, so it seems we completed it all just in time.

The Brooklyn Unwind

Currently we have a lot going on. We had our survey the other day for packing and shipping our things to the UK. We are also doing the “Brooklyn Unwind”; we are selling our car, showing our apartment, throwing out a lot of junk, going though our storage location to see what we should bring, giving away electronics that will not work in the UK, etc.

Arriving in the UK

On December 1st we are going to move over there. We will have our stuff packed up on the Friday/ Saturday, then spend saturday in a hotel and leave on the Sunday AM… at least this is how we think it will go. From there we will go to ~2 months in corporate hosing somewhere in the Chelsea area in London. During that time we will be looking for schools and apartments.

Both schools and appartments are hard. Just like in NY, getting into a good school and a the right appartment is: Hard to find, expensive, hard to get into. Hopefully we will just sort it out. We have been looking at neighborhoods for some time now.

Help and resources

Some of my friends in the UK and friends of friends over there have been more than helpful. One of my friends was kind enough to write up a sort of compendium of necessary Londoner facts for us – quite an effort. Aside from friends, we have used certain websites a whole bunch:

1. The forums at UK-Yankee are amazing. People are beyond helpful.
2. xpatulator was useful for real cost of living comparisons
3. Net-Lettings great starting point for finding a place to live
4. Up My Street a good resource for drilling into neighborhood details
5. Foxtons the single greatest place to look for apartments/ houses
6. Netmums a good overall help on many fronts of life as a parent in the UK

We also have a few books that have been helpful

1. The Good Schools Guide 2008
2. Living and Working in London, 4th Edition: A Survival Handbook
3. Rules, Britannia: An Insider’s Guide to Life in the United Kingdom

So – thats where we are. More to come – the big day is approaching.

-Chris-

Today is my last day at PCH. I will say that I have learned a bunch here and that I will miss all the people. As a Lead Software Architect at PCH – I have been able to hire lots of great developers to work for me. I have also been able to take on some very challenging projects. I think that in the end – I really did not like commuting to – or living in Long Island. I also can say that I really did like building applications for the web that need to service millions and millions of people. They have 2 web sites in the top 100 – both of which were rewarding and challenging to manage over a  few years. Another facet that I really enjoyed was working on the internal facing desktop applications. We were able to really remodel workflows, business practices and ways of doing business – and it helped the business. I think that the modeling process – understanding the business and modeling it in software is also extremely exciting and something that the team here was able to do amazingly well. Another thing that I am proud of from my time here is how well we developed our process, methodology and standards. We were able to work out what we have referred to as a ‘Scrum Derivative’. We were able to move to a methodology that was agile, yet organized. We could take requirements (user stories, prioritized and scored) and make effective plans that we could deliver on. I love the idea that software teams can get highly tuned and execute repeatably at a high level of complexity…. That whole thing is just great – Live, in Tune, and on Time!

Anyhow – I wish all my former folks the best and I know there are many genuine friends that I will keep in touch with.

So long PCH…

Wow  ~4.5 years of being with Publishers Clearing House – it has been great.

• Built 2 top 100 on internet web sites
• Built 1/2 million LOC SmartClient app.
• Manage > 1 million LOC of pure C# code over several years.
• Hired many excellent developers
• Learned immesurable amounts from my peers, superiors and everone else I saw on the day-to-day

That being said – it was time to change things up for various reasons – so… Now I look forward to starting with Finetix real soon. Wish me luck!

It is hard to take a new position when you are comfortable. It is hard to leave a team you spent years building. It is hard to trade comfort and offers of more comfort for more work, the need to re-prove yourself etc. The bottom line is that, as I have often said “If you are too comfortable – you are not learning”. So – bring on the learnin’