What do you do now? Is there a demand for CS skills at the LHC, and was it a fulfilling place to work in general? Presumably you lived in the UK that whole time?
The LHC is in Switzerland (not the UK) and in fact I'm still here. I was a data scientist for while. These days I'm back in research, but in a different field.
There is a huge demand for CS skills of all kinds. CERN has one of the largest SCADA installations in the world, runs its own internet exchange point, operates a network of computing centers with a million cpu and hundreds of PB of data, and maintains many many millions of lines of code of specialized software, just to give you an idea.
It is a fantastic place to work, the level of expertise and dedication among the people there (scientists and engineers alike) is very very high.
They have also shown an impressive 1000-machine kubernetes cluster running on GCP for analyzing data (they did a live demo at KubeCon in 2018 I believe where they ran the Higgs boson data analysis during a panel).
There is a huge demand for CS skills of all kinds. CERN has one of the largest SCADA installations in the world, runs its own internet exchange point, operates a network of computing centers with a million cpu and hundreds of PB of data, and maintains many many millions of lines of code of specialized software, just to give you an idea.
It is a fantastic place to work, the level of expertise and dedication among the people there (scientists and engineers alike) is very very high.