In the middle July 2016 - on Friday, when I was on my way to 3rd round of DriftOpen championship, I received a very strange call from work colleague:

“Hi, …, our office is being closed now. Would you want to me to take something from your desk?”

I thought that’s a joke at first, so I had to check it with my other colleague. This info was so absurd that I just couldn’t believe it (there is a very long notice time in Poland). I witnessed one company going bankrupt but I surely didn’t expect this from a company that just opened a new big office in Poland. So I proceeded with packing everything for drift competition and finally took off for a trip from Gdansk to Koszalin.

Unfortunately for me, the information about my current employer LowCostTravelGroup’s bankcrupcy has been proven (http://www.gazetakrakowska.pl/strefa-biznesu/a/krakow-lowcosttravelgroup-zbankrutowal-ponad-200-osob-stracilo-prace,10411642/).

At first there was doubt

I was just about to make a U-turn and travel back since my budged was very tight for each competition. My entry fee was already paid. Same can be said about fuel, tires and hotel as well - so after some re-thinking I decided to continue my journey and work just on my ruined psyche until Monday on my trip back.

Thankfully - I am a developer. Info about my employer going bankrupt spread very fast amongst headhunters and before I could even think what to do next, on Sunday (when I was still on track) my inbox looked like this:

…I was still shocked how so important things in life can change so fast.

So, it is very good to be a developer in today’s times. I encourage everyone who still hasn’t decided what to do in life or thinks about changing his profession to become one. I could end up like famously quoted Twitter engineer:

The 37 minutes before I found a new job were the darkest moments of my life.

Not as bad as it seems…

With the amount of job offers growing exponentially I decided to give myself 3 weeks for finding an offer that would suit me best, and that was the best decision I have ever made. As it turned out, not only I was able to find an interesting job, but also one in which I will be able to make use of my car driving passion - Delphi Krakow, where I hope to work near autonomous cars.

I was employed mostly to get involved with .NET related projects, but quickly (about on my 3rd day) I was given a challenge: write a vision algorithm for marking road and cars in C++. Wow, that escalated quickly! I had to be extremely swift and learn quickly to come up with a viable solution, but this is what I always wanted to do - to get involved with autonomous cars.

Thanks to both of my passions I went beyond any expectations and my program is currently commonly used in the company to aid in labelling details of the road.