We arrived knowing nothing
The first time you cross the border for a trial shift, nobody has warned you. Not that your French CV, with its photo and its paragraph of personal qualities, would go straight in the bin. Not that you would be asked for a certificat de travail — not a statement of dates, but a written judgement of your work that the recruiter will actually read. Not that hiring follows the seasons, and that applying in the wrong month amounts to not applying at all.
We lost those weeks. An interview with no answer to “and the commute — will you keep it up?”, which is the first worry of any employer hiring a cross-border worker. A first contract signed without knowing which line mattered. Months spent wondering where we would be taxed, collecting contradictory answers that were all correct — but for a canton other than ours.
This programme is that list of mistakes, turned around. Nothing in it is theoretical: each module answers a question we asked ourselves too late, and gives the answer we wish we had heard first. That is why it opens with “is this actually worth it” rather than “here is how”. That is the order in which the questions come.