Cambridge (UK) engineer seeking job and home in Cambridge

And the quality of life ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

The OP opined that he got shabby quarters for £70/week. Is that "pretty good" quality of life?

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Hi all.

I'm currently looking for new work and accommodation in Cambridge UK.

Recent contract work finished and looking for work in mainly digital / some analogue. Have recently designed a PC104 RS232 board, and a small Bell202 modem. Have designed with CPU/MPU up to c. 20 MHz so far, some VHDL experience. Low/medium complexity stuff, but the spectrum of jobs in Cambridge stretches into the high-end stuff like designing custom silicon chips.

Job market and the economy finally seems to be recovering from 9/11. In 1999 I got 4 interviews/week, in 2002 things had all but dried up. Anyone else agree/disagree?

Looking for accommodation too. So far £70/week seems the lowest price for one room in shared house, and rather depressing houses at that (mouldy smell in hall, cracking lino in kitchen, grubby beds).

Anyone got any tips/experiences on good places to look?

Arbury has a reputation as the worst bit. Cost rockets approaching the centre.

My secondary job is on Clifton Road industrial estate so I don't want to be too far from that. Somewhere on the south-east side of Cambridge would be preferable, I can provide my own desk/bed/chair etc. I have no car yet so needs to be cycling distance.

Mind you, if there's a permie job not in the town itself, I can relocate.

cam.misc I think is what you have in mind.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Kryten wrote (in ) about 'Cambridge (UK) engineer seeking job and home in Cambridge', on Mon, 17 Jan 2005:

There may be something keeping you in Cambridge, but if not, I'd say 'Go North, young android!' (;-) Prices 50% lower. Salaries maybe lower, by not by as much.

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. 
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

Should be easy to get a job in Cambridge, though not as a contractor. Things have been pretty good for the last couple of years, but you're a bit short of experience for contracting (sorry!). Try the Cambridge Network site

for starters. There's at least one hi-tech agency covering Cambridge but employers will prefer it if you go direct.

You'd be crazy to get a room in Arbury. Anything off Mill Road should be the same price, and would be much better. There used to half-a-dozen letting agencies on Regent St. - just walk up and down it.

Forget about paying £70/wk, though. It's 10 years since I've been in shared houses, but 300-400 pcm was the going rate then. There's an alt Cambridge newsgroup somewhere - ask in there.

Best places: anywhere near the river, Mill Rd (cheap/ethnic), nothern side - (Milton Rd, exc. Arbury, nr the Science Park). South-east is too far from anywhere.

Rick

Cambridge is IP-driven and, IMO, has seen very little off-shoring. The only exception I'm aware of is some digital IC verification which has gone to Bangalore, but I would be surprised if this was more than 20 jobs. A bigger problem is, I think, offshoring to the US. Companies get taken over, and the jobs eventually go with them.

I'm not sure that 9/11 made any difference at all here. The economy here has been on a high for the last 12 to 18 months. The next downturn is already here, but most people think it should be pretty minimal.

Rick

Na, it is not 9/11 over here. It the endless export of jobs to cheaper places. Since the jobs apparently prefer cheaper places, they didn't come back yet. I tend to think they're gonna stay there until we also drop the costs to compete again. Lets devaluate our currency down to 10% or so.

£70/week?!?!?!?

Wow!

£70/week comes out to about 800CHFr/month. This give hardly a hole here. Single Room apartements start at double.

Rene

£70 a week is cheap, especially for Cambridge.

Leon

It's so warm here this week I may have to turn on the air conditioning ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Jim Thompson wrote (in ) about 'Cambridge (UK) engineer seeking job and home in Cambridge', on Mon, 17 Jan 2005:

Pretty good: that's why it's not cheap.

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. 
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

Here you get a fine place (if you are Fungus the Bogeyman!)

It is plummeting relative to the amount of housing it buys.

A years salary used to buy a fifth of a house, now it buys a sixth or a seventh.

Well, mainly the fact that it is a lovely place. I never grow tired of biking into town and strolling around with my backpack. I'm afraid Cambridge has spoiled me for anywhere else.

Yes, I have decided there is no realistic chance of me ever being able to afford to buy a house here. Some new 1-bed flats are priced at 180K, 2-bed versions for 250K. I guess they started the project in the dot-com boom.

There's a stereotyped view that "it's grim up north" and perhaps not without foundation. Things become cheap when people don't rate them as highly. I could buy a huge house in some very northern climes. But I would be far from jobs that pay enough.

A northern mate objected, and said cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle on Tyne had recently spruced themselves up. I wonder if that is just the tourist-visible bits.

Mind you, there are plenty of grim places down south, without the consolation of being cheaper.

And it is grim living in a town where housing bites a major slice from your income...

Anyone want to recommend anywhere for having a high quality of life for the local average salary?

My mate reckoned Durham was like Cambridge but less geeky. Also rated Chester as really nice.

Cambridge is a great place.

A river to punt on, lots of foreign girls in the summer months, a good selection of pubs and restaurants, lots going on, plenty of academics & engineering types, some excellent museums, a botanical gardens, academic bookshops, swimming pool, an hour from London on a fast train (the "Cambridge Flyer").

Not car friendly though.

I don't live there now, but I'd look in the Mill Road area, beyond the railway bridge it may be cheaper.

I lived in Cambridge from 1982 to 1993 and quite liked it. The restaurants in Cambridge itself aren't impressive - Brighton and Oxford do much better - but the bookshops are great, and I found a good field-hockey club.

There is a lot of interesting electronics being done around there - albeit rather too much of it by Cambridge graduates who regard experience as an inferior substitute for a first class mind, and define a first class mind as one that has completed a Cambridge degree.

The university uses Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" as their electronics text, and the bookshops carried multiple copies, but their graduates have a distinct tendency to vanish into mathematical analysis at the point where they ought to be working out what is actually going on. Mathematics works for people like Newton, Maxwell and Hawking - the rest of us need to get our hands dirty.

------------ Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Gee that makes me feel so good about myself :-)

It is true there are jobs available, but they are rather specific about what they want and there are always many candidates to choose from.

Having said that, it does mean what interviews I do get are serious interest. My last interview lasted four hours and they said they were very impressed (they wrap interviews up a.s.a. politely possible if they are not).

Well I can point you to my online CV for a fuller story if you mail me your email address.

I found ECM promote themselves as only dealing with 'top' talent (i.e. those easy to place and earn fattest commission). Which is fair enough but they are rather dismissive if you are not.

I mean, if you meet a girl and she isn't all you hoped for, you don't drop the smile, say "Sorry, not interested" and walk off.

It does seem to have a good share of crazies, drunks, druggies, dealers, murderers etc.

That room was off Mill Road. On Devonshire road, near the Devonshire Arms(!). Handy if you are looking for some Caribbean atmosphere. Or want to roll your own. :-)

Finding those is not a problem. Finding reasonable quality accommodation at affordable prices is the problem.

Current room is £240/mth, 3x3m. Tiny, but house is home-quality.

My guaranteed income (excludes contract work) is £132/wk, enough for food and rent. So £400 pcm would leave £40/week between contracts :-)

For some reason, riverside houses are hugely expensive!

Ah yes, I used to live on the corner of Ross St, opposite the bed shop. I now live opposite Ridgeons on Cromwell Rd.

I heard Milton had some problems with its Traveller community.

If that makes it less expensive, great. It is near my evening job, and I can jog to Grantchester for a pint of cider.

Much of my contract work (e.g. circuit design) I can do at home via modem anyway, so I don't need a home near the clients business park.

An excellent point.

Cambridge has many good aspects that improve life.

And I am sure I can find a house that I find nice enough to live in.

However the difficulty is making the compromise between niceness, cost, location, and proximity to potential employers.

It may well be that it simply isn't possible to rent a nice enough room on my limited budget here.

In which case I might as well look for a room where it is possible.

I just asked the newsgroup to get an idea of the 'event horizon' where adequate housing disappears.

Like that round a black hole, it does enlarge over time as housing is sucked in.

I guess the centre would be somewhere around the market square.

The boundary is not very circular of course, due to the distortion of the cost-time continuum by places like Arbury, and the sewage works.

However you can detect when shops pass into the boundary, because thrift shops are turned into Italian restaurants and delicatessens. This process is called "spaghettification" :-)

without

I could do with your mate's positive outlook. It *is* grim up here. No matter the good night life , beyond their centres, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds etc, are still shit-holes. Even worse, it's bloody cold and there's some damned ugly wimmin about. Gimme France or Italy, any day. :-). Yes, housing is very affordable up here but we live in virtual fortresses, designed to deter the night of the living dead locals. Industry wise, only about 25% of the Hi-tech stuff filters in this direction. I'd stick with Cambridge, pay the silly housing costs and enjoy the people and the surroundings. regards john

"> I don't live there now, but I'd look in the Mill Road area, beyond the railway bridge it may be cheaper.

=====================

Or move to Dudley.

Aha! No stereotypes without prototypes!

Good job we're just passing through eh?

Yeah, I'd noticed.

In geordieland the menfolk are said to prove their hardness by going out in naff thin short-sleeve shirts in weather that would hard an Eskimo's nipples.

Call me a soft southern puff but I got the brains to wear a jacket.

Well that is Britain for you.

Before anyone protests beauty isn't so rare in Britain, just look at how much famous models get paid. Nobody gets that kind of money if they are not damn rare.

France: gawky but chic, Italy: often sultry but often loud and noisy

Druggies or Drunks?

Sounds like The Cursed Earth area from the Judge Dredd comics.

Personally I would leave the curtains open to show burglars how little I had to nick.

Though I would have to leave enough to deter squatters from thinking it was uninhabited!

I very seldom make use of the known good points of Cambridge. I can't recall when I last went punting went to a museum went out with a foreign student (Italian students travel in a loud group) went for a picnic on the backs went for a beer/discussion with any of the academics

Heck, even some of the people who are valid members of the Cambridge phenomenon have to live way outside the town!