Neil Franklin's Work Page

Sulzer-Rüti (SR) apprenticeship, from 1982.04 to 1986.04

After leaving shool (Sekundarschule only has 3 years vs 6.5 for Gymnasium) I needed a job. So I did an apprenticeship (common here under Sekundarschule absolvents) as mechanical draftsman in the design office for weaving machines

SR job, from 1986.04 to 1986.10

Between my apprenticeship and my study at TWI I worked for 6 months further as a draftsman in the same place I had done the apprenticeship

Computer Systems Design (CSD), from 1990.01 to 1990.04

After my studies I went to a small PC shop/engineering office. There I worked partly as programmer, partly assembling PCs, partly as system/network administrator, partly as backup salesman (when the boss was at customer sites)
This lasted only 3.5 months because the engineering side was closed down and I was not interested in pure sales stuff (this is common in Switzerland, firms start up in engineering and then survive by selling stuff engineered by others)

Sulzer Innotec (SI), from 1990.04 to 1994.09

After CSD I went back to Sulzer, this time the Innotec division (central research and deveopment). There I worked mainly as programmer but also part time as system/network administrator
In 1993 the firm was "verticalised", trust in the firms management collapsed, and my usually good patience was worn out by an badly running project with an unfriendly customer. It was time for something new, to change the job

work break / holiday, from 1994.10 to 1998.02

When leaving SI I calculated that my bank account will suffice for 3..4 years at the usage rate of the last 4.5 years. So no reason to quickly find a new job. So I decided to stay at home on a long holiday :-). This time was mainly used for learning stuff, one of which was starting with Internet, Usenet and the Web (E-Mail with uucp was alread in use beforehand). I also used this time to consolidate my knowledge, collected all and wrote it down, sorted it, and while doing this discovered a few connections

ETH Zürich Architecture, from 1998.02 to 2002.01

Back to work at the ETH Zürich at the Architecture Department in the CAAD Group and later after dissolving of that group for the Departments computer support group as System Administrator. This repetitive work became boring after an while, so I looked for something new

ETH Zürich Physics, from 2002.02 to 2006.12

After this I went further ETH internally to the Physics Departement, but there as programmer to build an automatic installation and configuration system, and after that userfriendly UCB stick support. After these jobs were done there was no more programming work. The offered new job (system administration) did not interest me, so it was time to look for something new

work break / holiday, from 2007.01 to today

Once again my bank account has enough for 2 years, so once again time to do an long holiday and learn stuff

This page is by Neil Franklin, last modification 2008.12.04