[solraph]

> Usually any given country will have one big spot for tech... ...My guess is that Melbourne is not a very good spot.

It's not an unreasonable assumption, but in this case it's incorrect. Sydney has more tech work, but only in proportion to its larger size.

That said, Melbourne tech work is very heavily (but not exclusively) orientated around finance, insurance, real estate and so on which is not everyone's cup of tea.

[defrost]

Indeed.

I've clocked ~40 years in Australian tech and managed to avoid all of those domains, web development, cubicle farms, and nearly (but not quite) office politics.

Could be why I still have all my hair and good health.

[cableshaft]

> Could be why I still have all my hair and good health.

If you just mean in regards to stress, then working tech at an insurance company is a pretty low-stress job from my experience.

Finance can be pretty low-stress too in certain sectors. Like I've been working for a wealth management and investment analysis company, and haven't worked more than a 40 hour work week in years, with lots of flexibility during work to go to appointments or run errands, and while we have sprints, they're very malleable, and the real deadlines are more on a quarterly level, and they try to be conservative with their quarterly goals to make sure they hit them.

Now if you meant as far as life fulfillment? Yeah I get that. But I at least have some other things outside of work I can pursue.

[defrost]

More that I've never been much of a fan of working in offices, I like the outdoor life and have done a great deal of coding "on the move" while transitioning old paper mapping systems to WGS84, building and field testing exploration geophysics instrumentation, aquisition and processing software, tagging and tracking trucks and animals in mining and agriculture, and building energy and mineral resource intelligence systems for use and then sale.

I've even managed to squeeze in some work on Cayley|Magma in Sydney (long ago) which is kind of fun as it still seems relevant today, being used to crack Quantum crypto candidates.

I've had burst of planes, trains, and automobiles with a lot of travel about the globe, which I've enjoyed, and long stretches of working from home since I started in the 1980s .. circles and arrows on the back of envelopes, coding and then working in sheds, building etc.

Doesn't work as a lifestyle for everyone but it has for me.

[cableshaft]

No that sounds awesome, and much more interesting than what I'm working on. Congrats!

I am working from an office, but at least it's a home office. I can crack a window for fresh air, and look out at the prairie beyond my backyard from my office window. When the weather is nicer I sometimes start the work day out on the patio.