Yet life wasn’t all roses. The disconnect between my life as a student and and professional office life wasn’t something I had a lot of trouble coping with. I moved back to Montreal one year ago because I decided that it was much more important to enjoy my life and spend time with my friends. I declined the offer to work remotely from Montreal and keep my job on the Garbage Collection team because I didn’t want to be isolated from my team. Unfortunately, the team I’ve been working with over the past year is nothing like the one I was working on in Ottawa.

On the bright side, this past year has given me the time figure myself out. I spent the time conversing with my mentor (who has kept me sane and focused), and chatting up dozens of people all over IBM to get an idea and a feel for where I would belong. One of the biggest advantages of a huge company like IBM is the diversity of its teams. Especially in Canada, where IBM grew out many acquisitions, the culture varies greatly from team to team. Talking to people from all different types of teams in different parts of the business helped me figure what I wanted out of my career.

Knowing what I wanted was the key step in figuring out where I should be going. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I looked hard enough I could find what I wanted, whether it was in IBM or not. I began to get discouraged, however, when I realized that Montreal lacks a bustling tech scene. Unless you want to work in videogames, your options are quite limited. As far as IBM is concerned, the teams that interested were all either back in Ottawa, or in Markham. I started to feel like staying in Montreal was holding back my career.

Writing about my experiences on this blog turned out be the best thing I could have done. Little did I know several of my friends, acquaintances, former classmates and colleagues actually read it. It didn’t take long for them to start telling me about the jobs that they have and enjoy, and offered to refer me to their employers. Shortly thereafter I had a two-week period where there was an interview of some kind every single day.

The company I decided to go with was also the first company to make me an offer. That company is Genetec. I was impressed with how quickly they got me through their hiring process. Right after applying, a friend of mine (whom I didn’t even know worked there) called me to let me know how much he loved the place and it’s atmosphere. When I went to visit the lab I fell in love with the environment. My gut feeling told me that I would be quite happy there.

Even then, I was hesitant to accept the offer right away. I wanted to see what my other options were and compare what different companies could offer me. The clincher was when I was participating at Les Jeux de Génies du Québec as a “parrain”. The team from Université de Sherbrooke was walking around with giant Genetec logos on their clothes. The fact that the company was so ready and willing to continually invest in student life spoke loudly to me. It solidified the initial feeling I had that I belonged at Genetec.

As for the project, I’ll be part of a brand new team building a brand new product from inception to deployment. This is an opportunity that I’ve been looking for since I graduated. I don’t get the feeling that it comes along very often. I’m very excited to start this new chapter in my career.

I’d like to express some gratitude and thank everyone who has helped me along the way, especially my mentors and all the IBMers that spoke with me over the last year.

So long and thanks for all the fish. :-)

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.

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.

The problem is that at the end of the day I have trouble organizing my thoughts into prose. Written language is so much more subtle than spoken language. I’m much more fluid when speaking to someone (especially if there’s a pint of beer in my hand). I thought of recording a podcast and instantly rejected the idea on the grounds that since I never listen to podcasts, I couldn’t reasonably expect anyone to listen to mine. Writing it is, then.

When I read 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School I realized I was stuck on Bad Habit #2: “Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt.” No one is going to tell me what I should be writing about, so I can’t keep bouncing around ideas until someone says “Okay, Skrud, I want to hear about x.” The hardest part about writing is figuring out what the hell I want to say. Once I know what I want to say the words flow naturally, but being indecisive about what I want to say is my writer’s block.

In a way, this is a lot like programming. I’ve always felt that 90% of the effort that goes into programming is just figuring out what it is you want to program. When faced with a particular problem to solve, the bulk of the work is solving it. Translating that solution into code is trivial by comparison. As I become more experienced in the art of programming, solutions become more obvious. Being familiar with the systems I work on allows to make quick assumptions that help me hone in on the problem areas much sooner.

With writing, I often find myself stuck in the what the hell is it I want to write-phase during which I stare at a blank page for uncomfortably long periods of time. Or worse, I get the ideas criss-crossed in my head and start going off on several tangents, failing to combine everything into a cohesive idea. In programming, this is akin to writing brand new APIs and modifying miscellaneous libraries instead of focusing on the problem at hand.

If experience in programming makes solving programming problems easier, then experience in writing should make the writing process easier. The more I do it, the more naturally and easily I’ll be able to put my thoughts into words. In other words, if I want to write more, I need to write more. Duh.

If you keep repeating this process, you’ll notice a pattern. Each time you start learning a new technique, built upon an old technique, there’s a lot of work involved. You focus your mental energy on understanding the differences. Eventually you become comfortable with the new technique, and it no longer requires much effort. You can perform it without thinking. Once you can perform without thinking, you’re not growing that skill anymore; the thing you’ve just learned becomes another tool on your bat-belt which can be used to learn and grow newer, more challenging techniques. In order to grow and become better at something, you must keep learning new things, applying the techniques you’ve mastered and developing new ones.

Streets of Rage was a series of beat-’em-up games for the Sega Genesis. One of the most interesting features of its gameplay was that the bosses at the end of a level became standard enemies in the following levels. In order to continue through the game you were forced to trivialize the enemies that at one time provided a significant challenge. Next thing you know, you’re fighting six of them at once and you can do it while yawning.

What kept the game interesting is that you’d have to keep growing your bad-guy-fighting skills. Each level introduced new mini-bosses and bosses that prepared you for the later bosses. How boring do you think Streets of Rage would be if, after beating the first boss, that boss was the only enemy you fought for the rest of the game? It wouldn’t matter if he came at you in swarms, eventually you’d become so comfortable and efficient at defeating him that the game wouldn’t be challenging anymore.

This same concept is something I look for in my professional life. I want bigger and better challenges. If I keep fixing the same kinds of bugs day-in and day-out, using the same tools, performing the same tasks, I’m not growing as a software developer. Skills which have become trivial for me are tools that I can use to learn more complex skills.

The ideal challenge is something that’s just beyond my abilities. Close enough that I’m confident enough to do it, and far enough away that I need to really stretch on tip-toes to reach it. Eventually I’ll get comfortable with it, I’ll be a little taller, and I can reach a little higher.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.