Next Steps

It was a year ago when Nokia's Windows Phone strategy was announced. I remember being very curious about the new strategy. I didn't feel that MeeGo was under any threat, since just few days earlier Elop had said that he thinks that N9 is great. My guess at that point was that Nokia would take Windows Phone to make products for operators in USA since that was the market where Nokia had most troubles with customers and operators.

I took the news pretty hard, I was very passionate about what we were doing. I had been working on Harmattan from its beginning and I was always confident that when it was finished it would be great OS. Developing Harmattan had been rocky ride with a lot big changes both in UI and technologies used. In february it was finally starting to look like we were on the final stretch. I was totally convinced that finally we had all the pieces (OS, HW, design) needed for challenging iPhone. My confidence on the OS made hearing the bad news even worse. I was not the only one who took the news pretty bad. That night there were plenty of drunk Nokia engineers in bars around Tampere. There was a lot of very committed and passionate people working on the N9.

The great "Unfollow"-ad for N9 pretty well describes my feeling about N9 now.

I've been now working on the open source MeeGo (MeeGo Community Edition first, and now Nemo Mobile) for almost a year. Unfortunately, after this month my current position ends, and I will have couple of months to look for new job within Nokia. I've been actively following internal job market, and HR has proposed few jobs for me, but unfortunately most interesting opportunities so far have not been in Tampere or the role's offered have not been what I'd want to do. Relocating further up north in Finland is not an option, since I hate winter already here. I do not think I want to relocate to capital area either unless I get a nice salary increase, and knowing Nokia HR I do not see getting one so likely. I've been eyeing on few positions abroad, but so far I have not yet found the perfect match. It is starting to look that I will not find interesting enough opportunity anymore in Nokia and I'll just take the resignation package and do something else.

I would be sad to leave, the company has been good to me. I've worked with brilliant, fun, and interesting people in interesting projects at Nokia. If I'll leave I will wish the people remaining all the best.

One of the options I've been pondering is to found a one man company that would develop mobile software to be sold at app stores. With the resignation package, my savings and if I could get funding from the company through the bridge program I would have quite good nest egg. According to my calculations I could comfortably live with the money for 1-2 years even if the apps I develop would not bring any income. The problem here is that I do not have any good ideas of apps to develop and I'd really prefer to develop my own apps instead of doing contract work.

I'm also looking for good opportunities in big technology corporations. I could relocate to an European city like London, Berlin, or München for an interesting enough opportunity. So far I have not yet applied to anything, but I've seen few interesting job postings in London. However the positions were not detailed enough to know how interesting those positions really are. Too bad that nowadays mobile operating systems seem to be developed in the other side of the pond. I'd really love to develop iOS, Android, or Web OS.

I've talked with couple of different startups that my former colleagues are founding. There are couple of really interesting ones even in Tampere. Some of these have been very tempting, but so far I haven't said yes to anything.

I'm quite excited about taking next step in my career. I've been pondering my options almost too much, because I want to really be sure that I know what I want to do. I want to make sure that I'm stepping forward. I really want do something meaningful and I want it to be challenging. I want to find the next thing I will be passionate about.