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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective MySQL: the Australian connection
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective MySQL: the Australian connection | MySQL: the Australian connection |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 20 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 7 His father passed away when he was nine; his mother is still in the Netherlands. An interest in computing does not run in the family though he says one common factor is that both he and his two older brothers have been involved in teaching and training, his siblings in schools. He came to Australia because he had a love interest here, a person he met online in an era when it wasn't at all common. But he was considering the option of moving Down Under for other reasons anyway. "It's nice and spacious. I like a bit of space, a bit of quiet and the relaxed atmosphere. In the Netherlands, the people are nice but it's very, very busy. My overall life attitude merges better with the way Australians deal with life," he says. "It's just the overall approach. In the Netherlands people tend to get terribly stressed about lots of things. Most people and most places in Australia tend to take things easy. It's the laidback thing, it's very difficult to describe. Just as an example, try and find a clock in this cafe (a Starbucks outlet in the Melbourne CBD). There is probably none. Any place in the Netherlands will have a clock. Everybody's always looking at the time. "The only reason I'm wearing my watch now is because of the training (he was in Melbourne to conduct a week of training). I put it on the desk in front of me to make sure that we have the breaks at the right time, that we go to lunch at the right time. Otherwise when I walk around in Australia, I generally don't wear my watch. "I'm renting now in Brisbane and the house is probably 600 or 700 square metres in area. There's space for a vegetable patch and there's a yard where my three-year-old daughter, Phoebe, can play. In the Netherlands, I'd be lucky to get a balcony. And, as it turns out now, Australia provided me with interesting opportunities which I might not have had if I had stayed in Europe." Apart from the experience that came from running his own software development company, Lentz had also done some consulting and training before he landed in Australia. He applied to MySQL after seeing an ad on the company's website. The interview and screening was done entirely through email. "I hadn't met anyone or talked to anyone over the phone. That was pretty much the common way MySQL hired at the time; these days, there is at least a conference call with several different people and preferably a face-to-face interview with someone in the company. |
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