This post could be titled “Good bye Switzerland part 2” as well. I’m flying to Oslo tomorrow evening and will start that my new position next week at the Opera headquarter. I’m very looking forward to discovering this open minded environment.
I wanted to tell the story of this year so far, because I’ve never tried so many jobs, considered such different positions and spending so much time without actually working.
The first three months were about leaving Paris. I moved there for Yahoo! and left it as I was leaving the purple Y. I was attracted by the US (more than London for example) and managed to have an interview at Meebo. I do know what exactly didn’t matched but I guess my poor on-site interview discarded directly. Such failures are very good in fact and shows you where you’re lacking experience or confidence in your knowledge.
Having nothing abroad, I considered joining a start-up in Lausanne and do so for three days. But the magic your need in a 6 people company has to be very strong and I left after two intensive brainstorming day where nothing changed. The cool part is that they actually did what I said one month later… for not a penny, just a “uhu, that is so fun that you were right”.
I came back to my mentor, the one who told me that I had to move back in January 2007 and it’s only question was very insightful: “What do you wanna do?” No answers or at least no clear answers. Start-up, why not, but you need a strong core team of skilled an working people. Anyone can have ideas. Freelance, yes, money but stress, shit-work and my young age isn’t a help for a first contact with someone. Normal company, but which one and for doing what. At that time he had some stuff to delegate, I did some and am still waiting for the money (projects aren’t finished because being the coding monkey doesn’t allow you to know what’s going on apparently). Don’t work with your mentor, your mentor know how to talk and have a different vision but he’s maybe not that organized.
I had in Lausanne one of the poorest HR contact ever. A company that ask a head-hunter to call you instead of doing it themselves. I still don’t get it and couldn’t trust anyone who lies in that way. A nice piece of bullshit though.
Then I worked in a bank located in Geneva, for a position I didn’t apply to (omgwtfbbq) and saw the lowest PHP skills, team managment, project leadership ever. When you want to defenestrate yourself the fist afternoon and tell you’re manager that you don’t know what you’re doing here aren’t necessary a good sign. I have new suits and ties till then, not used in the two days spent there.
Two companies in Geneva, more start-up like looking for a code monkey dude to do what they didn’t want or could. You cannot make someone happy that way, do you? It’s so amazing to see the lack of empathy, and developer likes to solve problems, not to code which is just the way to express the solution.
And finally the plan A, B, C, D, E and F times. The plan A is a company located in Bern that was looking for a Python/Web semantic dude (w00t), but their spam filter killed any email I send them. How many resumés did they miss?
One evening I had the feeling that I would be able to leave again, to pack my stuffs up and embrace a new environment (thanks to Silvana). And send applied to my future position. Plan B was born. Quickly after that, a tweet for the plan C which I first declined and then accepted to meet them when plan D (also in Zürich came). I went for plan D because it was a 2 months project which gave me more time to wait or find my way through this forest. The more you wait, the more it’s difficult to decide and be sure of your choice. Plan C was nice but imho uncertain and too engaging. E and F, were Montréal and a not-yet-born-two-years-old start-up in Lausanne both from friends. Oh, I’m not desperate either, thank you.
Plan D makes another one month project. I’ve really enjoyed being in lovely Zürich, in a “huere geil” flatshare. Practicing my rusty german skills and falling in love. Interesting to see how some service or software companies cannot become web companies. A too big paradigm shift for them. Most of the successful swiss web companies are fairly young (or managed by young people). Although it was great to have such a everything is working first day and nice workmates. How many offices you know were you can listen to Rage Against the Machine out loud in the middle of the day?
All this gave me the time to make plan B full of success. It’s always good to take your time and only go for things that are temporary or really kick butts. After so much interviews in a so small amount of time, I’m only on the work market for two years. I wanted to explain some things I like and the others I try to avoid. As I said during my interview for Yahoo! at the question if I already applied at Google is that I had the impression that Yahoo were looking for passionnated employees when Google looked for talented ones. The difference between the two is that the first one will know the most ackward bug in MSIE and its workaround; and the second one can tell you the big O value of the tricky algorithm you asked him to write on the white board (I like white boards).
I was mostly surprized to see that, even today, most of the swiss companies I’ve been through, don’t even ask technical questions or do a basic test. Asking for references is sometimes asked but most of the time, the resumé and one interview seals the deal. I like to have more insights about how the team is working and was skills are required.
Writing a correct job description is as hard as writing a good resumé. I’ve been fooled by some questions on time. The product manager was asking me questions about what he was looking for, what he wanted to do in the future like if it were something they were actually doing. The facts showed me that they were far far away from being able to achieve that. Simple things like SCM and documentation. It was a significant gap between the advertised position and the actual one. The final result is an epic failure of bad communication.
At the end, this is more how I would like to operate if I had to interview people. I would be nice, maybe too nice, expensing everything. But I’m not yet in that situation and won’t have to in the next months or years, so I can now relax.
