Patrice's Weblog

I spent Friday and Saturday at the T.Camp of the Swiss Web consultancy namics. That’s a yearly conference for the namics techies. As a member of the namics sister company local.ch I was also allowed to participate. And like every year for the past five years I held a presentation again. This time I talked about testing. Specifically Selenium.

It’s much the same as I’ll talk about on September 12 at the Webtuesday event.

You can download the presentation.

I attended the Webtuesday yesterday, hosted by Jürg Stuker at the namics office in Zürich. The talk was mainly done by Urban Müller of search.ch about their clustering implementation. Statistics, performance, server redundancy, etc. were the topics. Bernhard Seefeld talked about his current solution for Endoxon. And Cédric added a few notes about our solution at local.ch. Silvan and Stefan of Tilllate had a few things to say about their layout as well. All in all it was a very interesting evening with lots of stuff learned. I guess all of us learned a few things.

We then moved to El Lokal for a beer and Pizza. We of local.ch had to accept being defeated by tel.search.ch for looking up the number of a Pizza delivery service. But only because we don't have the mobile interface ready, yet. It's already being implemented, though and is one of the lacking features I personally care most about.

It was once again interesting to meet a few people I had only met online so far, especially Denis De Mesmaeker and Alain Petignat.

Next time I'll talk about Ruby on Rails which I already defended at our table yesterday. We planned/are planning to have that event on June 13 but that date collides with the Swiss victory over France at the Football World Cup. Details are currently being negotiated and will be announced on the Webtuesday Zurich Web site.

It appears that the Swiss job market in the tech sector is not as bad as I thought for some time. If you are a well-qualified individual you should have no problem finding a job - at least in the Web sector.

Why do I say this? Well, recently Bitflux had a job opening (now filled), local.ch has also been looking, as is now search.ch. namics has a few job openings as I'm sure have other agencies.

All of them have one thing in common which was not always true for our sector: they look for highly skilled workers (though namics also has internships in Baar/Zug and in St. Gallen). A few years ago, companies in our sector were adding people to their workforce like wild and thus had to sacrifice on quality. Now it's the opposite.

I for one believe that is a very welcome change and so do many of my friends. But I also know a few people who profited from the "more liberal" practices during the dot-com boom.

Anyway, I'll add a few articles in the following weeks on how to improve your chances for getting an employment in this area. It won't be rocket science but I hope I have a few tips to share. Those articles will be available in English and in German.

And I suggest you tag job openings on your weblogs with the "jobs" tag. That will allow job seekers to watch the tag (or subscribe to it).


Update 1: Forgot, that KAYWA also is looking for talent.
Update 2: And Google also is looking. (Via relab.ch).