I didn't post yesterday because I was sorting out my work situation. For the past year or so I've been working with a Turkish IT consultancy which has gotten me pretty decent jobs, and which spun off a new group that I've been working with. The money has been decent by Turkish standards, which in my rule-of-thumb guestimates means someone in the IT industry in Istanbul can expect to make roughly 1/3 what they would in a non-NYC/Valley market in the US, assuming you get in with the corporate market. (For non IT jobs it seems to be about 1/5). This isn't as bad as it sounds, since the cost of living is quite low - you can live very well on $30k/year in Istanbul, certainly better than you could on $90k in NYC.

But I've been bored as hell. It's hard to find the kind of work that I'm into - Internet technology stuff, in particular back-end, database-driven web stuff. While I've been able to find jobs, they haven't been particularly interesting, and it's getting to me. There are a number of reasons why this is the case.

The economy here is of course not great, which limits the kinds of jobs to be found for an IT professional. There are a handful of corporate megaliths, each of which has banks, TV channels, newspapers, insurance companies, and, these days, a mobile phone network, and everything revolves around these. 95% of the money in this country belongs to these groups, so if you don't get a job in that sphere, my guess is you're working for peanuts (a few hundred dollars a month) in a place like an internet cafe.

The technology these companies use tends strongly towards the "enterprise" school. IBM is here in force, but focusing more on big old back ends (mainframes, etc.), with some EJB, and one time I saw a Linux box from IBM being used to monitor processes on other Unices.

I wouldn't describe the technical environment here backwards, exactly - I see more people using mobile phones in Istanbul than I do in New York. But the IT industry has got that big-company gravitational thing going on, it's like working on the surface of Jupiter, the only stuff that you can get going is big, bulky, and slow.

Internet technologies offer potential for Turkish business, and the fact that they're a bit behind the curve makes an opportunity for a battle-scarred veteran of the dot-com bubble. We can avoid the missteps and red herrings, skipping the whole "push" and "vortal" crazes, for example, focusing on things that can actually cut costs and extend the marketing reach of local companies to the rest of the world.

But refighting the battles with ignorant clients is a drag, explaining that giving $100 to a kid with a copy of FrontPage to build your corporate site isn't going to get the same results as hiring us for five figures. When I left London 2 years ago the companies there had mostly gotten past the online brochure phase, in Turkey they're just entering it.

I was up for all of that, and some of the people I was working for are hip to the possibilities, but the situation around me has deteriorated lately. The spinoff company I joined has imploded for completely non-business related reasons, and I've been left adrift. This has a lot to do with language and communication.

Lack of language skills, while not crippling since most people in the industry speak reasonable English, makes life hard. The only things you know are what someone specifically decides to communicate to you, or what you can directly extract through questioning. The casual chatter and gossip that clues you in to what projects are coming up, what's on the boss's mind, who's thinking about leaving, etc. are hard to connect with.

Rather than picking up on hints of major changes ahead, you often learn about things after they happen, when you realize the guy you were working with last week isn't coming back from his vacation and start asking questions. It's probably worse for someone with an introverted bent, but this kind of thing didn't happen to me in English-speaking offices.

Ah, well, live and learn. I'm now officially between jobs, working from home, "free-lancing", yeah that's it! I have some good prospects back in London, so it's all for the better, I'm able to take this time to work on various projects that have been simmering rather than panicking.

It will be a drag to leave Turkey, I really enjoy living here, aside from not having interesting work. The weather, the food, and the people are things I'll miss if I return to London - at least I have plenty of good friends there. Returning to an English-speaking environment will be nice - the day I get back will be a very good day for Foyles' Book store, and I will probably never make it through the stack of magazines I'm going to buy!

But I fully expect to return to Turkey to work at some point in the future. In the meantime I need to work on my Turkish.