Geekflex

This week marked the one-year anniversary of my first full time job after graduating. I gained some experience and learned a lot about the company, its people, processes and teams. But more than anything I’ve learned a lot about myself. This has hardly been a solitary journey, and in the past year I’ve discussed with many different colleagues, mentors, managers, supervisors and even executives — both inside my company and elsewhere. I’ve participated in community discussions about engaging “Generation Y” in the workplace. All these experiences have helped me to identify and articulate those things that I believe are essential to happiness in my own career.

1. Face-to-Face Collaboration

I want to work with people in person. This could mean brainstorming together, bouncing ideas and solutions off of each other, and helping each other learn. It could include gathering around a whiteboard, or even a pad of paper, or getting two or more people huddled around a computer monitor trying to solve some nasty little bug. Or pair programming. Two heads are better than one and communication is infinitely more efficient if you have two people sitting together side-by-side. Some things that take hours to explain over the phone, instant messaging or e-mail can take mere minutes to explain in person. You can save all this time and extra frustration by just pulling up a chair next to someone else.

2. Friends

I’d love to have coworkers whom I can relate to on a social and cultural level. I want coworkers whom I can be friends with. The advantages of working with friends are endless. Collaboration amongst people who know each other well and get along is so much more meaningful. The small distractions that friends provide at the workplace, such as sharing a clever comic or YouTube video, add some positive energy to the environment. Something so simple as having a friend to eat lunch with can make a world of difference in a day that might otherwise be spent in isolation. These relationships extend beyond the boundaries of the workplace and become real, meaningful friendships. Going to a bar after work for happy hour, catching a movie on Tuesday night or heading to the Just For Laughs festival together are all things that coworkers who are also friends with each other can do. In short, it makes sitting in an office more lively.

3. Challenge Me

My university career was spent learning, developing and honing my technical, social and communication skills. My internships and my first year out of school have given me some practical experience. In order to grow, learn and master these skills I need to challenge them. I would love to be working on tasks that are just beyond the reach of my abilities, forcing me to learn something new or apply my skills in new ways. Naturally, every job will have some tedious aspect to it, but a sufficient challenge can be a reward for sticking through the menial parts and make everything worth it. The trick is finding those occasional projects that make me say “This is why I love this job.”

4. Talk To Me

Just as I seek out technical challenges to practice my technical skills, I need a forum for improving my communication skills. Unlike the stereotypical “geek”, I’m an extrovert. I love to talk, socialize and explain. I welcome open discussions and sometimes I like to play devil’s advocate. I thought that the ability to communicate effectively was secondary to my technical skills but what I’ve learned over the past year is that communication is a skill that needs to be cultivated. I’ve also learned that I need to communicate as much as I need a technical challenge, if not more so. The main reason I come into the office everyday is because it’s less lonely than sitting in my apartment. I only exercise my option to “work from home” if I have an excessive backlog of laundry to do. (In other words, it’s better than showing up to work in my pyjamas because I’m out of clothes).

5. Lifestyle and Location

Like others of my generation, I work to live. Money and wealth are not my primary motivators. Life should be about living. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that I can confidently say “I love my life.” If that’s not happening, then I know I need to do some moving and shaking. When I was working in Ottawa, my job was pretty awesome. I regularly had technical challenges and was working with a team of ridiculously smart people. After a few months, however, I learned that I simply couldn’t live in Ottawa. I found that I was sacrificing my lifestyle for the sake of my job. No job could replace the friends, entertainment and culture that I had enjoyed throughout my time in Montreal. It seems obvious now, but it was a tough lesson. I learned that the city I live in has an immense impact on my happiness and well-being. I need to be able to do the things that I love doing, whether it’s attending the Fantasia Film Festival, Nuit Blanche, the Eureka Science Fair or simply hanging out with my beloved friends. The bottom line is that my job must enable me to live my life to the fullest, or better yet be a part of what makes my life worth living.

It’s taken me a full year, but I feel like I’ve finally been able to state with confidence what I want out of my career and where it fits in with the rest of my life. Now that I know what I’m looking for I’m in a much better position to find it. World, here I come.

It’s something I’ve heard told over and over again. It’s the underlying message of virtually every keynote presentation at CUSEC. It’s something to strive for and believe in. It seems obvious when you think about it, but it’s amazing how often this simple mantra gets ignored or pushed aside or put on hold. In what is likely the most inspirational speech I’ve ever seen, Gary Vaynerchuck states “There is no reason in 2008 for you to be unhappy.”

Why do we need so much encouragement to do what we love? If we love to do it why aren’t we doing it already? Too often we get stuck thinking that it’s just not that easy, but is that really true or is it just a cop-out on our parts? Maybe when I say “not now” I’m really just too scared of what might happen. It’s no surprise then, that those same keynote presentations very often tell us to take incredible risks.

It’s one thing to be risky, but it’s a very short step to being reckless. “Taking risks” doesn’t mean doing something stupid without thinking of the potential consequences, it means doing something with a high probability of failure with a potential for great success. You have to know what that failure can entail and you have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, even though you might not know what success will bring. In her keynote presentation at this year’s CUSEC, Leah Culver talked about dropping everything and moving to San Francisco. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. Her answer was “Well, I go back to Minnesota and live with my parents.”

Before you even get to the point where you’re ready to take risks to do what you love, you have to know what it is you love, don’t you? You have to put your heart and mind into it, focus on it, and when the time is right make your move. And therein lies the challenge. How do you know what you love? Every job is going to have its share of grunt work, whether you’re working for yourself, or a startup, or a mega corporation. It could be dealing with bureaucratic overhead, your clients or your mom. Po Bronson phrased this sentiment very well:

The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?

That’s a lot easier said than done. The very first step lies in figuring out who I am, what I like, what I don’t like, what I can grin and bear and what will eventually lead to breakdown. Only once I’ve got enough of that nailed down can I really start looking at where I belong and what I should be doing with my life and my career.

One thing that deeply troubles me in virtually all aspects of my current place at work, and one of the places where my own personality and the corporate culture clash is on the emphasis on working remotely. Sometimes it’s under the guise of “thinking globally” and working with people in another geography and sometimes it’s called “work/life balance” by allowing people to work from home. The ability to work from home is a fantastic benefit, but it has to be done in moderation. To me, there is no substitute for face time.

I’m currently working on a team in a small software lab where the vast majority of people work from home regularly. I’m often one of maybe five people (out of 15, I think, but I don’t know for sure) who actually show up to work every day. Our lab may be small, but that’s at least 2/3 of my coworkers and teammates that I almost never see. Taking into account the support representatives and customer service people, who are my liaisons in debugging client problems, and the QE team and developers in India, I realized that I haven’t even physically met half of my coworkers.

Ignore for a moment the overhead of using collaboration tools versus working in a co-located environment, or the problems inherent in time zone differences, because those are other points that, though important, are not the one that concerns me most. Instead, think about the social, psychological human consequences of working remotely from coworkers whom you’ve never met — and possibly may never meet. Establishing a relationship with these people of the same calibre that one could establish with a co-located physical human being is simply impossible. Our brains are wired to notice and process various minutiae of human-to-human interaction including but not limited to: body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures and eye contact. These aren’t simply additives to the human-to-human communication experience, but they are key factors in how we, as human beings, communicate. They aide us in building a mental perception of the people that we meet, and this enables us to communicate infinitely more effectively with that person than we would ever be able to had we never met them.

The consequence of not having face-time is that we are unable to build accurate mental models of the people we are communicating with. We don’t know their quirks or their personality. In effect, we don’t know what makes them them. Communicating with them over SameTime, E-Mail or even the telephone will leave us with a gap in our understanding of them. The information that our brains would normally be processing in a physical environment is missing. We have to work that much harder at clarifying our ideas and explaining ourselves clearly, when a simple whiteboard drawing coupled with some hand gestures might have done the same job in a fraction of the time. We must make every effort to remove irony and humour from our speech in order to avoid possible misunderstanding, which has the unfortunate side effect of making us sound altogether like very boring people. We act less like humans, and more like robots.

When I saw Fred Brooks, Jr. give a presentation at ooPSLA in 2007, there was one point in particular that made a deep impression. (You can download an mp3 of the talk here).

“Face-time is crucial. Telecollaboration really works among people who already have spent a lot of face time together. And it really works quite well in those cases. Absent that, travel to get the face time is worth what it takes. And people instinctively know that and so the airplanes stay full.

I don’t believe that “telecollaboration” is impossible, but I do believe that it’s impossible to build any sort of meaningful relationship with someone whom you never physically see, or whom you physically encounter infrequently. Face-time is most crucial in the early stages of getting to know someone. This is when we build our mental models of that person and develop a context in which to understand them. That context is what enables us to communicate effectively with that person even if we’re not in the same physical space. In other words, once we have established a context for a relationship with another person, the overhead of remote communication drops dramatically. I would even make the comparison to a long-distance relationship with a significant other: once a relationship is already established, being physically distant even for extended periods of time is challenging but not insurmountable. Eventually you will still need to meet face-to-face.

I often feel like I expend more energy trying to compensate for the lack of real human contact than focusing on my primary job role. One of the biggest factors that attracted me to IBM was my experience as Extreme Blue intern, where every day would be spent working closely with each of my 3 other team members. Asking a question meant wheeling my chair into an adjacent cubicle. That’s about as direct and as quick as one can get. My teammates were more to me than just coworkers, they were my colleagues and friends. Coming to work every day was a pleasure because it had as much to do with social interaction as getting things done. Contrast with my experience as a full timer, where asking a question today means getting an e-mail response tomorrow, and the only time people talk to one another is to assign them work.

A cubicle is a very lonely and quiet place when you have no one physically next to you.

There’s a problem in our culture and in our language that causes us to infer identify based on our occupation. We say “I am a software developer”, “I am an engineer”, “I am a marketing rep” and “I am a student”. We use these statements to build up our identities. When meeting someone for the first time, they almost inevitably asked what’s called The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: “What do you do?” They almost never ask “Who are you?”. And what happens when someone actually does ask “Who are you?” … Well, you’ll most likely start with your name immediately followed by your occupation.

This is so freaking wrong. But we can’t help it. It’s imbued in our culture. It’s as if you really are only a reflection of your job. And what if your job doesn’t make you happy? What if it’s something you do to pay the bills and to fund the rest of your life? Well then you might not very much like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question.

“If you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.”¹

Throughout my university years I identified with being an engineering student. I embodied that identity in every way I could. I attended every conference and competition available to me. I became involved in my university’s undergraduate Engineering student association. I’ve even won awards for “outstanding contribution to student life”. If you asked me who I was, I would proudly answer “I am a student in software engineering at Concordia University.”

Then, I graduated. Suddenly I was no longer a student. The conferences and competitions were no longer open to me. CUSEC 2009 was my last, big student event that I could participate in. It’s as if the persona and identify that I had embodied with all my spirit was all at once out of context. I suddenly didn’t know who I was anymore. I wasn’t the long-haired, lovably drunk software engineering student anymore, though I was still a long-haired lovable drunk. But that answer didn’t satisfy me at all.

I found myself questioning my identity. How much of who I am was really me, and how much of it was a subconscious attempt to embody the identity and image of a “software engineering student”? Naturally part of the problem is that I had trouble identifying with my new role as a “professional” software developer at a big company. Answering The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question with “I am a software developer” just doesn’t jive with me. I don’t feel that it accurately portrays who I am the way saying I’m a student did. In other words, I work as a software developer, but there is much more to me than that.

I don’t like my answer to The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question. As I mentioned, I feel that there is much more to me than my job, but extending this interpretation reveals that my job doesn’t give me enough room to express my own identity. This is why I’m not satisfied simply saying “I am a software developer”, because that is but one small facet of who I am. There are many more aspects to my personality that are hidden, looking for a venue or an outlet with which to be expressed.

I was incredibly lucky to have found outlets for all aspects of myself in my identity as a student, and now I’m struggling to find new outlets in a different context as a member of the working world. I need to change, and recognizing that was not easy. So as a symbol and a tangible reminder of the fact that I’m no longer a student, I finally got a haircut and shed the curly ponytail that I’d kept since the 8th grade.

Hello, World.

Many attendees noticed that the career fair was drastically toned down this year compared to previous years, and that we also had fewer sponsors. One of the main reasons for that was the stock market taking a serious hit in early October. A lot of the companies we had been negotiating with — even those that have previously attended CUSEC (and loved it) — could no longer afford to attend.

The way sponsorship works at CUSEC is fairly straightforward. We put together a sponsorship package which we send out to companies that we think will be interested in. The package is just a document gives a brief idea of what CUSEC is, who the delegates are and what our previous sponsors have said. It also includes a list of sponsorship “levels”, each of which has a price tag associated with it. Each level also includes a number of benefits such as: a booth during the career fair, the ability to supply bag inserts, their logo displayed prominently and having conference rooms “named” after them.

Most companies are willing to pay a significant sum to have access to top notch students, and those are the kinds of students we have at CUSEC. That’s not just hearsay. The feedback we get from our sponsors is astounding. They are extremely pleased with the recruits they get from CUSEC. Many of my friends found their full time jobs through CUSEC, as did I. As Tim Bray said:

everybody I know in the biz is hungry for talent, and here are 350 kids, a high proportion of them about to graduate, who care enough about what they’re doing to take the trouble to go to a three-day conference including a Saturday. Talk about self-selecting good candidates.

We begin negotiating with companies in the late summer and early fall. By October we begin to finalize the contracts, and by November we get them signed. The money starts to roll in during December and January, which is all well and good since most of our expenses aren’t due until the conference actually starts. We’re actually very flexible with how we work with our sponsors. The costs of our packages can be mixed and matched with merchandise to give out at the closing ceremonies, or a service that’s provided to us free of charge.

This year, we were negotiating with a record number of companies. We started off incredibly strong and had garnered a lot of interest. As per our normal operating procedure we expected to finalize the contracts starting in October … then poof. A lot of companies lost a lot of money. Hiring freezes were everywhere, and few had the budget to spend on recruiting. And believe me, many of these companies tried to dig pretty deep, too. Their HR departments know how valuable it is to recruit at CUSEC. But there’s a limit to how much you can compromise. The danger is that if you make a special deal with one sponsor, you run the risk of another sponsor finding out about it. Then you could up in a situation where Initrode complains that Initech paid less money but got a bigger booth, or more exposure, or something like that. Maintaining a trustworthy relationship with our sponsors is something very important to us, so we make sure to treat them equally and fairly.

Suffice it to say our sponsorship packages aren’t cheap. They provide a huge chunk of our funding. Conferences are expensive to run, and CUSEC is no exception. The money has to come from somewhere, and if it all came from delegates it would cost a hell of a lot more than $60 per person. Here are just some of the factors that go into the costs.

Booking the conference centre. Even though January is a relatively slow season, this ain’t cheap. We need two conference rooms and open space for three full days (and nights). This includes tons of hidden costs that go beyond simply holding the rooms: there need to be a Maitre D’ to oversee the event; there needs to be internet on site, since the hotel’s basic wireless can’t handle so many connections; staff needs to be hired to deliver and clean up the coffee, keep the water jugs filled, and all these other little details.

Coffee during transitions. Yup, each coffee break costs money. And these are usually per-person charges (and it’s more expensive than Starbuck’s. No, seriously). We have to estimate how many people will drink coffee (or tea) and order enough for that amount. We usually underestimate, because if we fail to reach the minimum then we get charged for the excess. This is how conference centres operate. In addition to that, every conference centre I’ve ever known has a rule against bringing in outside food. This is both because the centres’ caterers maintain a monopoly on the food served on site, and also because the centre is responsible should anyone come down with food poisoning. So we can’t simply run to Tim Horton’s and bring back a few giant jugs of coffee. (Likewise, we also can’t run to Subway and bring back 400 sandwiches.)

Keynote speakers are the foundation of the conference. We make sure to treat them very well. If we’ve invited a keynote speaker, we will pay for their transportation to Montreal, their stay at the hotel, and for their food during the conference. We don’t pay the keynote speakers to speak. Instead, we cover their expenses so that it shouldn’t cost them anything. This is a significant portion of our budget, but it is certainly not one we’re willing to compromise. The experience we give our speakers is what encourages more speakers to come, and the wonderful things our speakers have said makes it all worth it. We want to bring the best speakers we possibly can, and this is a sure-fire way to ensure that they have few excuses for not coming.

Miscellaneous little things that all add up: t-shirts, nametags, printing the proceedings, printing up posters to display on campuses, and various incidentals that happen while the conference is running. These may not seem like much but believe me they add up. The only perks that organizers get as far as our budget is concerned are a complimentary stay in the hotel as well as lunch and dinner all three days. We’re pretty strict with what we’ll reimburse our organizers for, and in fact we even have strict limits on how much our meals can cost. (Also, CUSEC will never pay for alcohol. That’s what my credit card is for… :-S)

Banquets, Cocktails, etc., which we didn’t have this year, because we simply couldn’t afford them. A banquet isn’t cheap. You need to hire caterers, book a ballroom, pay for the staff, bar, and all the stuff that goes along with it. We made a decision very early on that unless we could afford to do a banquet properly this year, we weren’t going to do one. The banquet in CUSEC 2008 was a disaster. Some people were lucky enough to get their food in a reasonable amount of time, while others (like yours truly) were still awaiting their soup while people kept harassing them “Hey, Skrud! Where are we going drinking tonight!?!” and then by the time I finally got my meal and got out of the restaurant, the bar I had sent everyone to was so packed that I couldn’t even get in. Never again. (Note I am most certainly not the only one to have had a poor experience with that banquet. It got many more complaints than praise.)

A proper banquet is expensive. To hold it in a hotel or conference centre, you’re required to use that venue’s own caterers. They don’t come cheap. Would any of you have been satisfied if your seven-course meal consisted of seven slightly differently shaped lettuce leaves? This is also why CUSEC doesn’t provide catered lunches. If we wanted to hold the banquet elsewhere, such as at an external banquet hall where we could find our own caterers, then we’d be stuck with the trouble of getting people there and back. Banquet halls that aren’t in hotels or conference centres are also not usually downtown. This would mean adding the cost of hiring a shuttle bus, or paying for metro passes for everyone.

We were hoping to compromise and provide a cocktail instead of a banquet. Always thinking, we knew a cocktail would be less expensive. We could provide, say a single drink ticket (good for alcohol or a non-alcoholic beverage) and make the rest of the event a cash bar. If we had the extra cash, maybe some h’ors d’oeuvres as well. While it would’ve cost us less than half of a swanky banquet, the lower amount sponsorship this year meant that we had to cut it.

Sponsorship is a lot of work, and we had to stick to our guns and be incredibly persistent to get even the small number of sponsors you saw at the career fair. Our Director of Sponsorship, Juan, put in an incredible amount of effort and an astronomical amount of time to make it happen, cold-calling companies if she needed to, leaving voicemails and calling back, never taking “no” for an answer. CUSEC 2009 would never have happened if it weren’t for her efforts. Next time you see her, make sure to give her a hug.