Geekflex

Where you choose to live is not something that can be underestimated. No matter how important a job or a career might be, once 5pm rolls around and you go home for the day you still have to live there. I’m not sure to what extent citizens are influenced by a city’s character or vice versa. It might be that the sidewalks roll up at night in some places because people prefer to spend their evenings at home, or maybe people prefer to spend their evenings at home only because there’s nothing else to do.

There’s no doubt that a city’s character and attitude can affect your perception of the place. Paul Graham describes this concept acutely in his essay on Cities and Ambition:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

His point is that if you know exactly what you want to do, you should go live in the place where that sort of thing is being done. You should surround yourself with people who are doing that sort of thing. For example, if you wanted to pursue music then you should probably go live in Nashville, which is literally off-the-charts compared to other cities’ music scenes. Whether the people are influenced by the city or whether it’s the other way around is irrelevant when you think of the fact the people there are still providing much of the influence. The fact is that in doing what you want will come more easily if the people around you want to be doing the same thing, too. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. To quote again from Paul Graham’s essay:

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

Although the essay emphasizes the work and career aspects of the city you live in, I think we also need to consider the lifestyle and social aspects.

I do believe the the key is to find a balance between an interesting work life as well as fulfilling social life. I’ve been going to extremes on both ends of the spectrum, so it’s no wonder I’m so far unsatisfied. I started my career at IBM’s Ottawa lab working on the garbage collector for the Java Virtual Machine. It was a very, very cool job. I got to work on some pretty exciting things and dive head first into the low-level inner workings of the VM. I was dealing with complex problems that I’d only read about in textbooks and I loved it. Yet I found that the city’s attitudes and subtle messages were running against the grain of my personality. The underlying message in Ottawa that permeates the very fabric of the city is: “Settle down.”

And I was not ready to settle down. I had just graduated, I felt like I had an infinite sea of options ahead of me and I could do anything I want. The last thing I would want to do is “settle.”

My social life went from its peak in university to a dead stop as soon as the moving truck left with my belongings in it. It was like hitting a brick wall while traveling at 200mph, without anti-lock breaks or airbags. There were several factors that contributed to the social vacuum I experienced, but I think that ultimately the root cause was that I moved prematurely. I still had unfinished business to deal with in my hometown, and I was not mentally prepared to say goodbye and move on. I probably would’ve been unhappy no matter where I ended up. Having said that, I’m still not ready to settle — least of all in Ottawa.

When I moved back to Montreal, I jumped from extreme on the work/life spectrum to the other. Although I was asked if I would be interested in keeping my job on the VM team while working remotely out of Montreal, I declined because I didn’t like the idea of being isolated from my teammates. Instead I switched teams to the only software team that operates in Montreal, which is a very different kind of team from the one I had in Ottawa. My social life has indeed improved since I’ve returned, but I am regretting the decision I took to switch teams.

I have not, for even a second, regretted the decision to move back to Montreal. This city’s message is much more in tune with who I am. Montreal’s underlying philosophy is “Enjoy life.” You can feel it in the pulse of the city’s streets. This city is alive and its character is emphasized everywhere you go. Not a day goes by where I don’t think to myself, at least once, “I fucking love this city.”

Despite the city, my social life is beginning to experience its natural decline and tapering off as I get older and more disconnected from the life I had as a university student. This gradual sense of slowing down is exactly what I need now, even though it’s been causing me no small amount of anxiety. It’s important for my personal growth to learn to deal with this very natural part of growing up. This is what my brain knows, anyway. My heart is still not willing to give it up.

The experience of my move to Ottawa is still tugging at the back of my head. I wish I had never gone so that I could experience this gradual decline at a more appropriate pace. Instead of hitting the brick wall at 200mph, it might have been more bearable if I were going 50mph or if I’d have had time to install airbags.

One thing I learned from the experience is that I have to be more careful when choosing a place to live. Many people have told me that Ottawa is unique in quite how boring it really is, and that this is only something you can really know once you live there. I learned that I need to spend enough time in a city to be able to hear its subtle messages before I decide to lay down roots there. I’m hoping this learned caution is a good thing, and if I do decide to move somewhere else I’ll be better prepared.

It’s no secret that I’m looking for the next step in my career, which means a little more than simply saying that I’m searching for a new job. Although IBM is an excellent company to work for¹, their opportunities in Montreal are severely limited. If I wanted to work on an interesting, exciting and challenging project at Big Blue, I would have to move to either Toronto (well, Markham) or Ottawa. More and more I’m beginning to realize that staying in Montreal is becoming a career-limiting move.

I’ve tried the Ottawa thing already, and lasted no more than 7 months before frantically scrambling back to my home city. The job was good and the team was smart and motivated, but the city town was dull. There are several reasons why I was miserable living there, and it wouldn’t be constructive to list them all here. The most important factor was the distance and separation from my close friends. Sociable as I am, I never expected to have such a hard time making friends in Ottawa. Making friends is something that has come naturally to me and posed no challenge throughout my university experience. One of the benefits of university, of course, is that I got to spend nearly all my waking hours surrounded by an ever-changing group of like-minded people around the same age as me. Contrasted with work, where I was significantly younger than most of my co-workers, making it difficult to approach them as anything more than just simply “co-workers”. Most of my evenings would be spent miserably sitting on my couch. The loneliness was unbearable, and the misery of it affected how I felt about my job and my work.²

The clincher was when my group of friends collaborated and built a bar to give as a birthday present to my best friend in the world. Although they waited until I could be in town before surprising him by erecting the bar in his living room, it broke my heart that I couldn’t be there to help with the construction and my only contribution to the effort was a bottle of banana liqueur. It was then that I realized that my friends won’t all be in the same place for much longer. In fact, two close friends have already moved to BC. For the time being, my closest friends are all conveniently gathered in one city and I don’t think there’s any reason for me to live anywhere else. Case in point, when I was feeling down a few weeks ago, a group of friends colluded in secret to surprise me and cheer me up. They stormed my apartment carrying beer and food and a card which they had all signed right under my nose at a party the night before. These are the people that make my life awesome, and if I only have a limited time to take advantage of us all being in the same place then I am damn well going to enjoy it while I can. If I leave now, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

Needless to say, I’m not willing to move back to Ottawa. Although my initial move may have occurred at a premature stage in my life, the experience has embittered me to the concept of leaving Montreal altogether. I’m not saying I’ll never leave, but I’m certainly more resolved to staying for the time being.

The problem is that Montreal is far from the best place to be looking for technology jobs. That’s not to say there aren’t any jobs here — quite the contrary. Programming jobs are a dime a dozen, but I’m not looking just another job. I want to start my career. To that end I know what I’m looking for, and it’s not easy to find. I need something that will enable me to grow as a software developer and as a person, that will challenge me and force me to make decisions, improve my existing skills and learn new ones. Regardless of whether I’m looking within IBM or without, I know I’ll have much better luck finding my professional niche in Toronto³ given that there are simply many more teams and projects to choose from.

I’d like to say I’m comfortable biding my time until I no longer have such strong roots in Montreal — once my friends start drifting away and finding their own careers and lives elsewhere — but I’m not. I’m getting antsy and agitated. I feel like these next few years are critical for establishing the foundations of my long-term career. I’m young, energetic, ambitious and passionate. I have all the drive and determination in the world. These are traits should be put to work investing in my future. If I wait too long there are opportunities that I’m bound to miss, and the longer I wait the older I’ll get and the less time I’ll have. Now is the time to get started.

I feel stuck.

If I stay in Montreal, I will have all the people who are important to me nearby. They will continue to fill my life with love and genuine happiness and there is no measure for how much my life is enriched by having them around. Yet I’ll be sacrificing opportunities to advance in my career, to learn and grow as a professional and contribute significantly to industry. On the other hand if I leave Montreal for a career, I’ll be deserting my friends and the immeasurable joy they bring to me. I used to believe that I could build a bustling social life for myself no matter where I am, but the move to Ottawa last year changed that. I’m now much more hesitant to leave for fear of reliving that loneliness again, and I know that even if the job is amazing I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it if I didn’t have close friends to enhance my life.

I haven’t yet given up on finding the perfect career in Montreal, and I will continue the scour the city with a fervour. But maybe it’s time I start sending my resume elsewhere as well just to see where it leads.

This January marked the culmination of a year’s worth of hard work, as I was the co-chair of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC). Throughout the organization process we had to make a lot of tough decisions. Overall, the conference was a huge success. Including our speakers and sponsors, we had over 400 people attending. The talks (I’m told) were amazing, and people felt inspired.

This first installment is about why we hold CUSEC in Montreal.

You may have noticed that each year, with only one exception in 2005, CUSEC has been held in Montreal. I often get asked why we don’t move CUSEC around, specifically I’ve heard the question “Why not Toronto?” at least twice each year for as long as I can remember. There are a number of reasons we keep CUSEC firmly planted in Montreal, and why we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The first reason is student density. Montreal has more post-secondary students per capita than any other city in North America ¹. This includes four major engineering schools each with Software Engineering programs: Concordia, McGill, École de Technologie Supérieur, and École Polytechnique. Concordia alone sends more delegates than any other school, with over 70 students each year.

The second reason is that Montreal is fun, and it most certainly has that reputation. To the students coming from quieter university towns, CUSEC is a good excuse to come to Montreal and party. The one year CUSEC was held in Ottawa, attendance dropped tremendously, and the increased cost of transportation and lodging was enough to discourage Concordians from coming out in their usual numbers. The fact that CUSEC includes a trip to Montreal is actually a very big draw for a lot of students, and a lot of them like to take the time to tour the city while they’re out here.

Then there’s real reason we keep CUSEC in Montreal: The legal drinking age in Quebec is 18. If we were to host the conference in Ontario, a significant portion of potential delegates wouldn’t bother to attend — especially those students are still 18 years old and hail from Quebec. Why would they travel to spend a weekend at a conference and be forced to skip the inevitable parties?

CUSEC is primarily an educational conference, and it always will be. However, even though the main focus of the conference is on content, we take the fun factor very seriously. I strongly believe that you will learn more from sitting down and having a beer with one of our keynote speakers than you would from being lectured at. That’s why the pub night has become such a tradition. I would feel terrible for anyone who had to miss out on a social event like that simply because they were underage. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to meet and network and socialize with students from other schools (and something I don’t think we did a great job with this year, but more on that in a future post).