mcdowall

I similarly spent a few years working in this space (TfL, digitising their data and website etc). It always struck me just how nuts the weekly meetings between different station operators and TOCS within the GLA would be, essentially a shouting match to determine who would have to keep their station open that weekend. Resultant timetable changes on the fly were always fun content to keep updated.

Timetabling (at that point) remained very much a manual process, I think they had to bring a poor chap out of retirement who wrote them by hand.

The key differentiator here is the storage requirements (2-8c ‘normal refrigerator’).

That’s much more accessible to developing / low GDP countries as opposed the cumbersome and expensive storage requirements of the other two.

I've been contracting for 8 years now. I'd recommend CWjobs / ContractRecruit and PurelyIT - just search and refine based on location / skills / required rate.

Jaron Lainer - Who Owns the Future is a great read on the topic of owning and monetising ones data.

The book ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Harari talks exactly to this point. A really excellent read.

I’ve worked on this in London recently, presenting my working concept (and months of data in tableau by location behind it) at a few events. The industry is a few years off it, particularly the physical tech, which would require digital screens to be hooked up to an ad server of sorts (that doesn’t really exist programmatically either) and then serving custom ad formats (non IAB format) in real-time (taking in variable factors that could effect the demographic and/or volume of eyeballs). Measurement of the eyeballs and said demographic is the gap, though that’s more than currently exists in the Out of home market right now(nothing!).

It has legs, you just need serious commitment from an owner of inventory (physical boards), which are controlled by 3 or 4 organisations.

I'd classify it into three groups for the UK...

Perm - Mid level benefits + Pay (maybe options in a startup)

Contractor - Individual with their own Ltd company, pays less tax and much higher take home pay but without any benefits.

Consultant - On-site via a supplier on a framework of some kind, however, often a permanent employee of the supplier with the supplier cashing in the margin.

At least 50% of the tech workforce in companies I work with or where peers are at in London are made up of contractors, especially in Banking.

Totally agree with you here. The contracting market in the UK (particularly London) is much more lucrative than relative permanent roles, even when their benefits are taken into account. It's actually more lucrative on tax here, though the Gov't are trying their best to change that.

It's also my experience that you get what you pay for, contractors in the whole tend to have a much wider breadth of knowledge from various sectors and hit the ground running whereas I don't tend to see the same appetite from Permanent employees (in most cases!).

I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.

I was in Belize a few years ago and think I had Lobster for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, so cheap!

It's on the way. The beta was about for 9mths or so

From the comments I'm trying to work out who you are, struggling tho!

This seems a rather odd article, there are many useful sites (particularly in London) that enable you to search for properties in a much smarter way these days, check out the tools on www.findproperly.com , find spare rooms on www.spareroom.com or even act as a property caretaker on www.guardiansoflondon.com

I'd second the UX suggestion, it's always the role that is difficult to fill in teams and only going to grow in demand.

It should be great!. I'm not overly concerned, we had our own riots and disruptions prior to the Olympics in 2012 here but when it got to the point of the event common sense prevailed and everyone seemed to get behind it.

I was in Bangkok during the riots a few years ago and then Crete during the Greek ones, just being sensible helps you navigate around those sort of things.

UK, Contractor.

A 4 week long trip every 6months or so, though the last trip was 10 weeks.

3 to 4 weekend city breaks per year, most usually geared around a sporting event, festival or a friends Stag/Bachelor party.

Next big trip is a month in Brazil for the World Cup in June. Aside from that Roland Garros in May and Oktoberfest in September.

I've been doing the same for the last 3 years, albeit not on the same scale. I contract every 6 months and then take a month or so off until like you I find my brain starting to feel neglected. I try to fit in a few weekend trips to cities during those 6 months.

I'm a technical PM so I tend to have to be on site for contracts and yet to find a remote PM role. That aside though I'm getting back to more coding these days so hope to be able to work remotely in the future.

In the last year I've taken about 10 weeks vacation, travelled all across the States, Hawaiian Islands, Fijian Islands (Yasawa's), Australia, Sweden and Snowboarding twice.

Contracting (think on site day rate) has allowed me to do this but only because I engineered it this way, I looked at Job boards a few years back and saw the qualifications I needed to get to get to the position and sort of rates that would allow me to take that time off to strike a good work/life balance.

I work 6 month contracts (sometimes longer) and take a month or so off at the end. Doing so not only allows me free thinking time and the opportunity to meet new people, travel to great places and experience new things but I also find I'm a lot more refreshed and valuable to the hirer for the next contract.

I know this isn't possible for everyone, hell, people need to work permanent roles right, but striking a good work / life balance is possible if you look for it.

I hadn't heard of Vayable before but will definitely consider some of the tours I've discovered for the month in Brazil at the World Cup now.

I couldn't work out on your site if these are Perm roles or Contract, specifically the Tech PM one?

I think professionalism bores down to basic communication skills, be punctual, responsive and considerate.

I've recently hired 2 "developers" from the freelancer HN thread to find them utterly unprofessional, requiring constant chasing and inconsiderate of the projects needs.

Thankfully I didn't spend a significant financial amount on them, but, for anyone looking at using that thread I would seriously consider oDesk or something similar with professional validations as a valid alternative. It really is a crapshoot with little or no comeback, and the quality certainly isn't top end from my experience.

I find lists like this and Sivers.org/book very useful for finding new reading material, some good ones I've read this year (in no particular order);

Who owns the future - Jaron Lanier

Canoeing the Congo - Phil Harwood

Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography

Venture Deals - Brad Feld / Jason Mendelson

1000 Ultimate Experiences - Lonely Planet

I can resonate with this so much, I travelled CR last year for a month and loved it.

I've just got back from 3 mths travelling the States, Hawaii, Fiji and Aus to do exactly the same, London had too many distractions and whilst the salary was great I knew if I didn't take the plunge to dedicate some time to the startup I too had been talking about for ages then it would never get off the ground. Oh, and seeing beautiful places along the way does wonders for motivation!.

I spent a month in CR last year, for such a small country it puts the UK to shame, I rarely found myself out of 3G coverage, even up in the cloud forest!.

Compare that to my usual South Coast train commute to London where I'm lucky if I get about 25% coverage for a 2 hour journey, and we're supposed to be a G8 nation!

On a side note, I've been working on my startup whilst travelling the states, Hawaiian Islands and backpacking through the Fijian Yasawa Islands and just got back to the UK. I'd highly recommend travelling to anyone looking to get something off the ground, I've always found it a cheaper alternative to paying rent in a fixed locality, there's nothing that beats just speaking to people from different backgrounds about your idea and getting their input.

I wouldn't limit that to developing nations, pretty much everyone I know uses WhatsApp in the UK, simply because mobile coverage is so poor that it's easier to send a Whatsapp than it is to send an SMS.

I seriously hope it doesn't cause any issue for these companies, I've just got back from a few months travelling and Whatsapp was invaluable.

I noticed that in your post as well just now,

"What you can see here is the result of many hours of work from Pete and I, ranging from programming time, to nearly giving up trying to understand the algorithms involved, to hours spent manually wrestling with Excel spreadsheets containing the data we needed. Let's just say that the world would be a better place if data was offered in a variety of similar, usable formats."

I'm leading the project on exactly that, our new Beta site is built upon the new API my team have been building (common data model, RESTful, lower latency etc). Ping me over a mail and we can get you involved in the beta API.

Our map changes 3-4 times per year for new stations / closures etc so supportability of something like absolute CSS locations would never fly. Fair play for giving this a go though, it's pretty darn accurate and super quick!.

Exactly.

In our new beta site (yet to launch) Walking and Cycling are right up front alongside public transport so we're pushing more options to the user.

It's a Schematic not Geo map. The Tube map is not intended for walking.