COOP2 (May - August 2018)
Summer is funner!
In contrast to the hunt for my first co-op, the second co-op came much easier with the fortune of picking between two offers in the end. One was a straight forward position at a safe but relatively “unexciting” company. The other was for an innovation lab at a pretty well known company in Canada. Innovation labs have a reputation of lacking substance and extremely hit or miss with the majority being the latter. It was a back and forth decision but in the end, I chose to go with the innovation lab since it had just opened and I figured that I had the opportunity to help establish and define the lab instead of begrudgingly accepting the processes of one already crumbling. Since the lab hadn’t opened at the time of my interview, many of my questions had only speculative answers but the interviewers assured me that they shared my concerns regarding innovation labs and would work to make sure there were solutions in place.
Day 1 of the job came and my worst fears were immediately realized. I arrived at the office within the Tannery in Kitchener, a historic building now used as office space for many companies (including Bonfire from COOP1). In addition, it houses Communitech, an incubator for small startups and innovation labs from larger companies. There are shared Communitech social spaces, events, and resources which help form the backbone of the KW tech community. I was vaguely familiar with this since I had spent the end of my previous co-op in the Tannery with Bonfire. I walked to the “Innovation Alley” where the corporate innovation labs were located and saw several tiny glass boxes side by side in a row. Above each box had a logo designating which company it represented. There was one box that looked new and had no such sign and I guessed that it was my company.
I walked to it and saw two people inside, one older woman and another boy who looked about my age. She introduced herself as the lab manager and would be my boss for the term, the other guy was my fellow co-op for the semester. I looked around the small room and saw a few bare desks and an empty white board. She gave me a brief run down of her background, she herself was non technical and didn’t know how to code. I didn’t think much of it until I asked who else would be part of the team and it was revealed that it would just be the three of us. A non technical manager whose career was spent neck deep in bureaucratic “manager” positions and two 19 year old kids. How were we going to do anything? I asked what projects we would be working on and she had nothing, something along the lines of “we’ll figure that out as we go”. It got worse when it was revealed that she herself was hired only a month or two before us. Nobody knew what to do and what was going on at all! The rest of the first day was spent setting up furniture and taking an incredibly lengthy tour of the Communitech spaces.
The next day, she told us that she had signed the two of us for the Communitech “innovation bootcamp”. For the next three days, we went to a seminar room and learned a bunch of buzzwords including “agile planning”, “problem focused thinking”, and some other jargon. I didn’t mind this too much, it felt like summer camp and we were enrolled with the other co-ops from the other innovation labs which was fun.
After the bootcamp was finished, we all returned to our innovation labs in the “Innovation Alley” and we saw most of the other co-ops get assigned their first projects. For my fellow co-op and I, we set up a Github account and that was about it. The following week, we took a trip to the head office in Toronto to hopefully get more (any) guidance and to understand what exactly the innovation lab’s goals were. There, we learned that the bureaucratic mess felt in the innovation lab extended to the head office with nearly all code having been contracted out overseas and next to no actual developers/engineers at the company at all! Everybody seemed to be some kind of “manager” but with nobody to actually manage, the whole company felt like a circle of self congratulation and empty titles.
We were told to vaguely “be creative” and “think big” and given an API to “play around with”. I created a small web app using the API for a particular use case in the following week and this 3 day mini project ended up being the last and only thing I’d code for the company the entire semester.
With the co-op being a bit of a bust, I capitalised on the freed up mental energy by moonlighting with a new side project. Like the last one, this project was a collaboration with my brother, although we set our ambitions much higher this time. By the end of the summer, a first version of an online “smart” course notes platform was created and ready to be used in a trial run for a class in the fall semester. This side project was a huge learning experience for me as a software engineer and made up for the shortcomings of my mismanaged co-op. As for spending more time in Communitech, it was pretty enjoyable. World Cup was on that summer and all the co-ops would get lunches together and sometimes hang out in the evenings too. We also got sent to a pretty cool tech conference where I got to see Spike Jonze of all people give a talk.
In comparison to the previous summer, I spent a lot more time this time in Waterloo. The summer evening glow along University Ave with students walking around the main plazas is an image that is probably forever imprinted in my brain, it’s nothing really that remarkable yet it perfectly embodies the contradictory lively serenity that I think is Waterloo’s greatest trait as a university town.
I continued to ride the upwards momentum from the end of 2B in terms of running and really rekindled my love for the sport this summer. Saw some steady progress but more importantly, began to enjoy the process of it all a lot more. I got a Kalimba (musical instrument) and spent time in my backyard just plucking away at it. Took some day trips to Toronto and went to two music festivals. Capped it all off with a fantastic 10 day trip along the Mediterranean coast from Rome to Barcelona. It’s hard to be unhappy in the summer.
Scattered memories:
- Field Trip music festival
- 800m night weekend
- Playing Fortnite and getting random crossovers with people from high school
- Weekends in Kingston
- Playing online Big Brother
Songs:
- When You Die - MGMT
- Space Song - Beach House
- Telephone - Most People
- The Shade - Metric
- All the Time - Bahamas