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Welcome Back, Qatar Back in 2011 when I was in Portland, I decided to leave my company, Otak, after working there for five years. I was the company’s GIS Manager – that’s GIS as in “Geographic Information Systems” which basically means “computer mapping.” I was working endless 80-hour (and sometimes 90- or even 100-hour) weeks at Otak creating maps and analyzing spatial data, while getting paid for only 40 hours, of course. After several months of those endless seven-day work weeks, I was getting pretty burned out, so I left my job and spent about a year at home working on some personal projects, including several home improvement tasks. It was a nice break and my house looks a lot nicer now.
After about a year at home, however, I looked at my ever-shrinking checking account and decided that it was time to go back to work, so I started applying for GIS positions around the Pacific Northwest. I happened to also see a mapping position advertised in the small country of Qatar and was intrigued, having done some work in the neighboring country of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) a few years earlier while I was with Otak. I never lived in the U.A.E. but I worked on several projects there, and I had visited the U.A.E. a few times.
I really liked the Middle East because it was so different than anything I’d ever seen or experienced, so I sent an application into the engineering company, Atkins, for this advertised GIS position in Qatar. After several weeks, though, I hadn’t heard back from them, so I pretty much gave up on it.
A few months later, around 8:30 one evening while I was at home watching TV, my phone rang. Now, about the only people who ever call me that late are solicitors, so I debated whether to even pick it up. But I did and there was silence on the other end – a sure sign of a solicitor. I said, “Hello?” but heard nothing but silence. Then, rather impatiently, I said “Hello??” again, getting irritated with this robocaller who’d interrupted “Antiques Roadshow.” I was just about to hang up when I heard a woman’s voice, sounding rather distant, on the other end: “Hello. Is this Del Le-o-u,” having trouble pronouncing my last name. By now I was sure it was a solicitor, so I impatiently said, “Yes it is,” expecting to be given a spiel about wonderful timeshares in Florida. But then she said, “Hello Del, this is Kaye with Atkins in Qatar. I was wondering if you were still interested in the GIS position you applied for a while back?”
I immediately changed my tone from irritated to obsequious. “Oh, yes. Yes, I still am!” One thing led to another and a week later I had a Skype interview with two fellows in an Atkins office in Qatar, which lasted a few hours and went well, I thought. They said they’d talk it over and get back to me.
A few days later, I had another job interview, this one near my home in Portland for a government agency called Metro. It was for a lower-level GIS position with few benefits. That interview went well, too, and a couple days later they offered me the position. I immediately contacted the folks in Qatar, preferring that position because it paid three times as much, plus it would be an interesting cultural experience, living in the Middle East. The Atkins folks in Qatar told me they were ready to offer me the job but had to clear it first and couldn’t commit for another few weeks. Metro, in Portland, told me they couldn’t wait that long for me to decide, so figuring that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush – or even three in the bush, given the large salary difference in this case – I reluctantly turned down the lucrative-but-uncertain job opportunity in Qatar and accepted the offer at Metro.
In retrospect, that was a mistake because three months later, and now employed at Metro, I attended an All Staff meeting there, where their CEO crudely blurted out some unsettling news: “We’re going to be laying off several staff members in the next few months. But none of you will be affected because we’re only terminating recent-hires.” She apparently didn’t realize that, sitting in the audience were several “recent hires,” including me. I’ve been through layoffs before and they’re not fun, so that evening I sent an email to the Atkins folks over in Qatar, asking if their GIS position had been filled yet. They hadn’t hired anyone, so we resumed our dialogue and a week later they offered me the job, which I promptly accepted.
As I learned, my new job was as Senior GIS Analyst for the Central Planning Office (or CPO), a new office staffed with about 150 Atkins employees in Doha, Qatar. The Central Planning Office had started up only a year earlier and its main function was to coordinate many of the transportation projects in the rapidly-growing country of Qatar. Qatar was growing quickly, I learned, not just from the oil and gas money, but also because the country was getting ready to host the World Cup soccer tournament in 2022. The Qatar government was building huge infrastructure projects there to impress the world in 2022, including a massive, new underground subway system and several new (and fancy) soccer stadiums.
I learned a lot of other things, too. Doha, where I would be working, is the capital of Qatar and has about a million people, roughly half of the country’s total population. The main language in Qatar is Arabic, of course, but English is spoken widely. Most of the country’s population is imported from other countries, mainly from nearby Arab countries, but also from India, Pakistan, the Philippines and just about every other country in the world. There are very few Westerners in Qatar, as they told me, and most of those were British. There was just a smattering of Americans in the entire country.
People have moved to Qatar from all over the world in recent years, and at drastically different pay scales, attracted by the oil money. In fact, Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world per capita and has the highest percentage of millionaires of any country in the world. Almost all of those millionaires are native Qataris, unfortunately for us Westerners, but we’re happy to help the Qatari government spend their money, like paying salaries for computer mappers brought in from Portland, Oregon.
So after turning down Atkins a few months earlier when I had accepted the job at Metro, I guess you could say it was, “Welcome Back, Qatar.” Those of you younger than 40 probably won’t get that joke, so just Google “Stupid TV Shows in the 1970s” and you’ll understand.
Above left: The Metro building in downtown Portland, where I worked from 2012 - 2013. Above right: My good friend, Steve, at Metro, always with a smile.
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