I graduated from York I did my Honours in
Computer science in 2006 and then I went to
McGill to do a post-graduate diploma in Finance. I've been working with Telus for a couple
of years now. I'm a product manager I manage end to end mobile browsing so if you have a Telus
phone you browse the Internet that's
my group, and I manage the cloud services
partnerships between Telus and some of the emerging cloud services vendors like Microsoft,
Google, Apple,  the regular usual suspects.
Thank you. Hi my name is Hossain. I graduated
I think in 95 or 96. It's rather far
back and I don't recall it and I did economics. I have always been
working in IT. I didn't go into economics.
I found  it easier for me to enter  IT fields
so that's what I did. I worked previously
at Bell Canada in the design field, network
design. And now I work with TD bank, in the
design field and consultation for IT. I specialize
in the whole sales side which is the trading
side of the bank. So my name is Hania Abd-El-Razik
and I graduated in 2006 from the computer
science program. I did an internship in 2005
with IBM and it was actually a co-op so it
was just supposed to be four months and it
actually got extended to 8 months and then
after that I did a student on-call for another
eight months before I graduated and was offered a full-time position, so I've been doing
that ever since. I just recently switched
my team within IBM and it's in the same
department but I'm now working in the rational team concert product which is a collaborative
suite that  is supposed to help software developers work together more efficiently. My name is
Eugen Spivak. I'm in the company providing
technology and management consulting services
to various clients. So in the past you could
change to pretty much work on every role that
exists out there in IT within various industries: telecom, banking, insurance and so on.
Well, this is always a trick question right, how you'll  land a role because it draws upon a bunch
of these different skills, all on-campus jobs
that you do while you're a student at York.
All the small jobs that you do essentially
all across your life. Your ultimate
goal, your ultimate career draws upon each
and every aspect of your academic and professional
experience. So it's not like one thing will
lead you to what you want to be. It's a
continuous improvement process where you're just continuously looking for new jobs just
doing different stuff. Doing internships,
you're doing co-ops, you're doing a bunch
of things and you learn different skills from
all of this. You build your knowledge base
and then you start applying for what you think you really like. So that's how you do it. I
did a bunch of jobs on campus I was a computer lab TA for the computer science and engineering
department I was a webmaster for the sport.yorku.ca. They're York's sport and recreation department.
So a bunch of,  you have to be constantly
engaged in your undergraduate term to learn
these, to learn different jobs, learn different
fields really.
Interviewer: And Ali, how did you land your
job at Telus? Was it something, did you have
a connection there, did you apply online?
Ali: No, well in all honesty you apply for
like hundreds of jobs online and then you
get one of them. So that's, that's how
it works. I've applied to jobs online and
I was doing it when I was not even in Canada.
And I applied for a business analyst position, essentially at Telus and they were looking
for someone who understood mobile web pages. I had experience as a webmaster at York University,
so that gave me some idea of what a mobile web page would look like. So that's how
I essentially started.
Interviewer: Ok, thank you. Hossein?
Hossein: In my case I just applied to the
company, for instance Bell Canada. I went
to the website, I sent my resume and the hiring manager happened to be hiring at that time,
and he called me in. Same thing, with-
Interviewer: You make it sound so easy (Laughs)
Hossein: Well, you need - you need in general, luck and like anything else. And the other
case with TD Bank, I think,  a recruiter
called me. That was the first time I've
worked with a recruiter and the guy had a
connection, and that was it.
Interviewer: Great, thank you. Eugen?
Eugen: And for me, the entry part into the
information technology happened from the quality assurance field, because quality assurance
does give a wide perspective, wide rather
than deep to business functionality, to business
rules,to  technology aspects. After that it was development/solution architect positions and
after that technical analysis and consulting,
which is pretty much business analyst, security,
all the other roles within IT. And then after
each role is known, then project coordination,
project and program management, all of that. I'd like to take the lead on this. So guys,
first off, networking is key. You gotta network with your colleagues, your peers, and everyone
that you see around you. You never know who's gonna end up at Apple. So you gotta be networking
with people. You gotta be nice to them. York(laughs). Uh that's really  that's
the truth. So, York is an excellent university.
It gets you lots and lots of exposure. When
I was in York, I had a chance to enroll in
some exchange programs, or something funky that
I don't remember what it's called. It's
something that the faculty of science and
engineering offers. It's  a couple
of months, they send you to Germany, they
send you to Greece, they send you some 
places in Europe and you go to study there,
you take some courses there. They're research courses, database courses and all kinds of
stuff there. So that's excellent exposure,
you go out in the world, you go see different
cultures, see different people. It gives you
people exposure, it gives you, essentially
all kinds of new experiences that you've
never even had thought of. So, you've gotta
be talking to people, you've gotta be participating in student clubs. Like this stuff that Tuan
was talking about. You've gotta join the
student council, you've gotta join student
clubs, you've gotta network, you've gotta
talk to more as much people as you can,
because that will give you the ability to
essentially, communicate and express yourself
well to other people. So when you're in
an interview situation, you'll be able to
tell the person what he's asking really.
As opposed to just blabber what you've been
up to. Interviewer: Great. Anybody else?
Another thought out loud is, we all have twenty-four hours per day. In other words, there is a
saying, a saying: wind blows on us all. So
it's how  how much more efficient we
are as compared to let's say, another developer somewhere in the Middle East or in India where
grades are extremely competitive from the
business perspective. What do we do here?
How do we leverage our local presence in North America to make sure that we are competitive
and that more and that we grow even more
competitive as we grow throughout our careers.
You'll find that the reality, that about
ninety percent of recruiters call about ten
percent of candidates. So you do need to plan your growth starting from early positions,
thinking three to five years down the road
when you'll have these different, more senior
roles to play. During this time, one of the
better advice that I have received when I
was sitting in your chair was to make sure
that you don't go deep, but you go wide.
So being a generalist has paid off so much
for me, at least in my career, that you do
know 80/20 rule. If not, do look it up and attempt to apply it to pretty much everything that you
see, whether it's knowledge, or any other
experiences and you'll be very successful
and more effective and efficient than other
guys who are not sitting in this room today.
Interviewer: So, don't go deep, go wide.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Interviewer:  Hossein? Any thoughts on
what they can be acquiring knowledge or skills while they're at university that might help
them succeed in a career in your field?
Well its only suggestion as I'm assuming
that most of you guys are technical here,
just asking yourself, how many of you guys
do take non-technical courses? Or its
good. I wanna tell you this much. No matter
where you go, you work with people, you develop technology for people, technology
solutions for people, so it's always someone at the other end who's a person. So bottom
line is, you need to be able to communicate
effectively what you want to be done, no matter
how good you are in your field, you need to
do that. And it's really hard. It's really,
really challenging to do that. And as you
progress in a company or in an organization,
the likelihood that someone will come and
tap you on the shoulder saying, Listen,
what you said last night wasn't really nice
in that meeting, would be very small. Because
the expectation is that you have developed.
So in other words you need to have awareness
about your behavior, you need to have awareness about your speech, you need awareness about
when and what you say. To whom you say that, it is very, very important. So if you think
that writing effective English is secondary,
I would tell you that it is a hundred percent
your primary objective to have that. So take
a course in English literature. It will help
you. It will. You can always take a course
in CISCO networking, but it's much longer
it takes much longer for you to develop
your skills in English language or in effective
writing, because simply this is not something you practice. So if you can take that, do
that for yourself. It will help you in anything
that you do in the future. Writing emails,
responding to people, is very, very important. Know the other side of it.
Interviewer: Well that's interesting because
I work with the technology internship program
with Christine and we speak with a lot of
the employers that hire our engineers, our
iTech students and our computer science students, and we ask them the same question and their answer is like yours, the same
they say the technical skills are important but you can
learn a lot of that. It's the communication
skills that they find the most valuable. So
they mirror what you just said.
I just want to add something to you guys. The
place I work with, my job is in vendor relationship and client relationship management.  My job is
60% non-technical. So in other words,
I have to take the technical solution and
present it to a business person or I have
to vice versa take their requirements and
present it to them  among other factors.
So the most important aspect is, how do I
make that clear to them that I have to understand their interests, my interests, and the company's
overall and present a solution that fits everyone, including the process that the company is
currently running. And one thing my manager told me that he hired me,   I think it
was a casual conversation. He looked at me and says, I can teach you everything, but I
cannot teach you how to be with people. And I never forgot that. And that has always been
always the case throughout my career. They hire you based on your enthusiasm because
you like the job and you're young and you've come out of school. That's the primary motive
for a manager to hire you, because you're
young, you want to do the work, they hire you.
As you progress, that will be less of a primary factor. It will be more secondary. They want
to look at you saying,  can you communicate with this guy, can you take it over to this
guy, can you make this, can we influence?
These are the skills that you need to have
in order to succeed in your job. Unless you
wanna work in a lab, that's a different
story. Okay. So folks  just to further something that Hossein
just said, so when you're working right,
what happens is, big organizations are essentially
split up in like two, three different,  different silos. So one of them is the IT world, one of the
is the marketing world, or one of the is the finance world. So you split them up. So what happens is,
at the end of the day when you're working,
you're managing all of these three different
paradigms, you're managing these cross-functional teams. So you need to be able to communicate
to those guys. So when you're at York, do
 be cognizant of this. Do take courses
in marketing, in finance, in ADMS 1000. Like stuff that essentially is unrelated to you.
Take up courses in technical writing. People in computer science essentially just never
bother with that. Do take up these courses
 these are really important. I cannot stress
enough how important  it's really important
that you become really good at Java programming.
That's the key. Without it, you're never
gonna get a job. But you got to learn technical writing.
You've got to learn marketing courses, you've got to study some psych. Take courses
in like a wide, a wide discipline of academic
courses that are being offered. Just, just
indulge in all of those. You're going to learn
something out of it.
I would also say, I would like to emphasize
that the communication skills and soft skills
that my co-panelists have been talking about, but also don't take things just because
you think they'll, they'll look good
to an employers. Take things that you're actually
interested in. Like for me, for computer science, there was how many credits of electives that
you can take. And York does offer a lot of
different introductory courses from different
faculties. So you can really explore what
you want. And I've actually been on the
hiring teams for getting in new students onto our team, and I could say that we definitely
do a lot at soft skills. And what we're
 we're not necessarily looking for people
that have the best programming skills of the crop. But what they're essentially looking
for is problem-solving and creativity and
the ability to learn. So I think that if you
have taken a lot of different courses, a lot
of different areas, and you seem to have,
you know, pretty decent marks, you can impress the employer or the interviewer with your
conversational skills or some interesting
projects. I think that that will go a long
way. Interviewer: Okay, thank you. And I know Ali
mentioned a little bit about networking and
recommending that as something to do now.
Any thoughts from the panelists on  besides student organizations, what they could be
doing maybe outside of the university now,
to network? Because I know everybody always
says network, network, network, but I think sometimes students are wondering how, how do I do that? Networking
with the people outside of the university.
Any suggestions on that?
My suggestion is again, don't network for
the sake of networking. Like whenever there's
a networking event at work, it's like, what
am I just going to stand there and just randomly
talk to people? But something like this, it' s
a natural setting for networking. I will know
my co-panelists by the end of it. Getting
involved in different clubs or events like this, something where
it's easy and natural to meet new people,
and it's relevant to what you're trying
to accomplish. Interviewer: Okay good point, something natural.
Yeah, so something that comes really
naturally is your classes and the professors
in them. Talk to your professors, talk to
them, just to get them to know you, hang out
with them, take them out for coffee. Get to
know them. They know people who are in the
industry right now. They know people who are working at Telus, IBM, Rogers, all these big Googles and all
these companies in the world. Your professors know them. So that, when you're in university,
I guess that's the first entry point that
you should be talking to your professors and
those guys. Then, talk to the folks among
you, because what happens is once you grow,
once you grow in age and once you graduate school, what happens is your fellows and your
colleagues in school and your peers in school end up being software engineers, managers, directors and everyone.
So that's your network base. It starts from
your classroom. From the folks that are sitting
around you. And it goes into those VPs and
CEOS, there are those officers. So you start
today, you start talking to people around
you. Play sports with them, you talk to them,
like hang out with them at Vanier College
or whatever you guys do, you know? Just talk
to people and then you'll see. That as you
grow, with time, like five years, ten years
down the line, you'll see that that guy
you used to hang out with is now a software
developer somewhere, is an engineer somewhere. So that's how you should start.
Interviewer: Eugen, did you have any thoughts on networking?
Yeah I can totally agree with Hania that it
is absolutely important to have to do
some form of networking. Well, I would recommend you rather than just doing the network, build
your coalitions. Build your alliances. For
example, you have a coalition for somebody
who is keen on business or somebody with whom you can exchange ideas about technology, because
there is a shift from information technology, the way that it used to be in the past, to
business technology. When you look at the
current job market there is less and less
of pure development positions, there are a
lot more of the architect positions, business
architect, technical architect and so on.
So, for you to be very confident in your first
position, you need to also be familiar with
project management methodology or several
ones of them that give place to employees.
Know what are the roles within the team and
also know what are the information exchanges between members of each role. So even though
you are a developer it will be beneficial
for example, to know what kind of inputs and
outputs are between business analyst and quality assurance engineer and so on. Once you know
these information flows, you know where to find information, after that you know what
to do with information, and you're on to
solid and good start. I'd also encourage
you to be different, because find out what
are the boundaries that you can take risks
within. And don't be afraid to take them,
because it's you know, different equals
risk, risk equals reward. So the more chances you take because you don't even have
to be better than anybody else. You just need to be different and you'll be better off.
Interviewer: Thank you. Hossein, any thoughts on networking?
I think it has already been said, I'm assuming you probably in your private lives you already
do anything outside  you do something outside school, maybe some of you guys are engaging
in activities in your churches, mosques, some of you have parties. These are places to where you meet
people and people who think alike and that's a reason you're in that organization. So
it's a very good starting point to be there.
The fact is, that you have passion and you
are putting in some time to these things outside of your work and school and you attend the
business of these organizations so that's
a good starting point for you guys. You can
go in there and just apply yourself and it's
not just about knowing people. People won't
necessarily come forward and just say I'll
do something for you. They will do it because
they see you're passionate, they see that
you have a lot of you know, charisma, or you're
contributing something to the organization.
So people do it once they see something from
you but don't have necessarily the expectation the first thing that you join the organization
and there will be a reward, there will be
a return on it. That's not the case usually.
Well, I guess I would like more of my time
to actually be on programming. As it is, it
might be like two, three hours a day maximum. There are a lot of meetings that happen when
the organization is larger so sometimes, you'll have like 4 hours of meetings per day and
there really isn't that much time to do
programming. And there's a lot of design
discussions like how are we actually going
to implement it, like this is going to be
the architecture. So it is computer science,
but it's not necessarily like you're coding
on your computer. The languages that I use
now is mainly Java. It's  since RTC is
eclipse space and eclipse is already in
Java so that's mainly what I use but in
my previous job, I was using I was doing
more web development so I think JavaScript,
CSS, HTML, JSP those are the languages that I used.
Yeah I can start. My most recent engagement was direct in the role of Senior program manager.
So the team on the projects for the consulting for various members, for various consulting members
consisted of about 60 people and they were all virtual. So this is where my previous
comment about what is our competitive advantage locally here,  comes from it. So the day, days
are three quarters packed with the meetings and these are any of the meetings to make
sure that the teams morale and team culture is reallly, really going upward that there are no issues or that there is adequete amount of focus on various securities, performance, various architectural issues and the decisions are made with all the right players at the table.
various industries, because even development style, style coding
style guys, all of those may be different between companies in various sectors depending on the business appetite for the change for the risk and so on
and do keep in mind that its the business that drives any of the technology so
it is always good to ask yourself a question, how does a given piece of code, how does
a given module contributes to the business
will it increase sales, will it grow company
