As of today, I am an employee of Konsultbolag1 (“the consulting company”) which, despite the name, is not an IT consultancy. Instead they provide training, consulting services and software tools for requirements management and testing of IT systems. The software tools part is the one I’ll be working with.

Before we got to Sweden, I was fully prepared for several months of job hunting. There might be no relevant openings, or I might not like them, or they might not like me. In the end it took no more than two weeks. We appear to have arrived right at the top of the business cycle for the IT industry: every firm is clamoring for more staff, and employees can afford to pick and choose.

Monday two weeks ago I searched through Monster and picked out 8 ads that seemed relevant and/or interesting. I also sent my CV to the IT departments of a few large banks. On Tuesday, the day after, I got replies to a few of my letters, and more followed the day after. 10 days later I had already met 5 companies, some of them more than once.

My initial plan was to aim for the finance/IT intersection: banks, other financial institutions, firms writing financial software, perhaps even IT consultancies focusing on the finance industry. And yet I chose the one firm I met that has no links to the financial industry. They seemed like more fun than any of the others, frankly. I also feel that I don’t necessarily want to narrow my career to “IT within finance”. I would rather broaden my experience than focus it. For that same reason I am also not continuing with Winforms or Office integration, but sailing off into unknown waters: web development (with ASP.NET).

So I will be developing software that will help other people develop even more software. That feels strange in a way: kind of circular. But at the same time I am keenly aware of the importance of good dev tools (as my previous colleagues can attest!) and good tools give me warm fuzzy feelings. The world needs more good tools, there can never be enough.