AFAIK (I'm not a historian): serfdom started disappearing from most of Western Europe around XV century. In XVII-XVIII it was mostly forgotten, and peasants were free men, who either owned land or rented it from the big land owners. Having said that, their standard of living was dismal (including starvation when prices or crops were low) - often actually lower than in countries which maintained serfdom, such as Poland or Prussia.
In practice, it's they who find you. Just change the address on your linked in profile to "London" and see the emails coming in. If they don't come, your CV is probably not a good fit to the current needs of available contracts (due not enough experience in technologies that are currently hot).
I've found two jobs in the Who's hiring thread twice, both of them remote! And I'm not even in the US. Out of your list, I only meet the "White Male" criterion.
> Not disagreeing with the general point, but aren't bones stronger after a break? I thought that was the whole point of martial artist's punching hard stuff.
They don't break the bones, but merely introduce microfractures.
London is good if you have experience in something that's currently hot - for example, as a big data contractor you can easily pull £100-140k. If you don't have that, there are probably better choices.
Regarding the pay, I'm a bit worried that it might not be the case in UK. For example, when working in Big Data positions (my current area), it's not hard to get 100k pounds per year or more, while I ads for scientific or graphic programmer (or anything non-enterprise for that matter) rarely exceed even 50k. The difference is that on 100k I can retire before 40 and on 50k I'll probably work forever... If that's indeed the situation I'll probably try getting into the US as H1-B as I hope the situation should be better there.
As for getting a self project - I'm thinking of doing a physics engine focused on static forces - something inspired by structure engineering methods (solving with finite element analysis for example). I have no idea if I can make things bend or break believably in real time but it seems like a cool idea to pursue.
This sounds very inspiring and it's one of the paths I'm seriously considering for my own future.
Do you mind asking you a couple questions? Where are you based? How does the market look like and what kind of pay can you expect as entry-level/experienced scientific programmer (i.e. is it a significant hit pay-wise when compared to standard enterprise/finance/google developer career track)?
This is all nice, but this means you've optimised for money and career progression. It works for some people (it certainly seems to be working for you), but for the rest of us, we'd also expect stuff like interesting/engaging tasks, good work environment etc. on top of the money.
Really? So literally every business activity (e.g. running a small grocery store on the corner) is 'making an impact'? For me, this term implicitly means making SIGNIFICANT impact, not just any impact.