At the very end of last year I wrote about goals for this year and regarding work I mentioned following:

• What direction to go?
• Look for new possibilities

These two subjects became serious issues recently for me which will result in some big changes for me (After been through a few changes recently). On the 1st of April (No April jokes, please) I will be starting a new job at a Technical University here in Switzerland. This will be the biggest job change for me during my 10 years here in Switzerland. This change is not only related to work but will go beyond it and result in changes for us all here (the kids, my ex-wife and myself).

Let me tell the story… This will be done in two parts, with the first one today and second tomorrow.

Suddenly no job and the problems…

I recently ended up in a situation that I never been in before really. I was without job, 100% unemployed.

The reason for this suddenly happening was that the project I worked on before was canceled almost from one day to another. I will not go into details why this happened but I fully agree that it had to be done. It had to be said that I have been working with/for a friend for the last 2 years and it was his decision that the project was canceled, this was pure a business decision so we are still friends :-)

Anyway, this meant that from one day to the next I was without any projects to work on; which means no work/money… I got registered as unemployed quickly after, but I’m a special case in the system here in Switzerland. Normally as self-employed you can NOT get unemployment money when you are out of work/projects BUT due to my special case I have been paying unemployment insurance. I did get turned down by the unemployment department but I have appealed the case with some facts. When this will be sorted I don’t know.

This also means that I have been without any income for awhile now and that hurts us all at the moment.

The search

Just after the news about the project been dropped I updated my resume (Thanks to Ian, Jon, Chris, Michael, Daniel & Ole.. and the people I forgot, for giving advise and feedback on the resume).

The resume got uploaded to several job sites and to my big surprise I was contacted by several agencies the day after. A bit unlucky as I had throat problems at that stage so I wasn’t able to speak. During the time I was looking for job I got several calls and emails from many people. One sad part was that a lot of them was from the UK; asking if I was interested in positions as game developer (programmer) at UK companies. Sure the jobs might have been interesting but I was never interested in moving away from here.

I spent many hours daily looking for possible jobs here in Switzerland. I also got in touch with friends from various companies to discuss the possibility for freelance/remote work on their projects and it was close a few times; but at the end nothing came up. During the month before I had been considering to look for work outside of the games business (Switzerland is a bad place for game development; so few companies). I often heard that it should be very easy to get jobs here in Switzerland, especially in the Zurich area when you work as software engineer. This turned out to be true but just not for me. My experience is just very narrow (But damn good if I have to say it); most companies are looking for people with Java EE (Enterprise Edition) experience, together with web application development. This is one area where I have absolutely NO experience.

Anyway, I never gave up and continued searching

Getting close to panic mode…

I was getting to a stage where I REALLY just needed some kind of job; yes, getting a bit close to panic. It hurts when there are no forms of income (and no savings) and the closer to the end of the month I got the more nervous I got. My ex-wife and the kids are also rather depending on me, they where very supporting and understanding all the time but that sure does not pay any of our bills.

Then one day I did another Google for “game developer” here in Switzerland and I came across a rather interesting job; which I applied for RIGHT away and within a very short time I went for an interview and was offered the job the same day. Everything went very fast and after some consideration over the weekend I accepted the job. Some might call this a rushed decision but I do not feel like that AT ALL; the job suits me pretty good and I’m still very excited about it. I actually went to the University today for some talks and that just confirmed that it was the right decision.

To be continued…

So panic turned into something rather exciting which I will write more about tomorrow. I will include some information about the new job and also what kind of changes this will involve.