NiR: The magic of co-op students
Here's my (edited) response to an interviewer who wanted to write about
NITI's slightly infamous co-op recruitment and management processes in
Montreal, notably the Human
Cannonball and Evil
Death Ray. As far as I know, NITI no longer uses these job descriptions
in their hiring processes and of course I can't speak for their current
employment policies, but here's a bit of funny historical information. The
format is a bit weird because I'm actually answering some questions that
I've cut out of the text. He specifically asked for some "funny anecdotes,"
so I did my best to comply.
...
In the very beginning it was just two University of Waterloo roommates, me
and Dave Coombs, along with the Corporate
Dog. We designed the basic functionality of Nitix (now NITI's main product) as a fun side
project and we ended up selling it to a few people. They told their
friends, who told their friends, and so on, and it became reasonably
successful (for a student-run business) but the time needed to do sales and
support was distracting us from our studies. That's when the other two
co-founders of what is now NITI, Ozzy and Greg, got involved to handle the
business side (including seed financing and our new head office in Markham,
Ontario). At that point Dave and I managed the technology development (in
between classes and exams) while they handled sales and support. In 2001,
about three years into the project, we both graduated, opened our R&D office
in Montreal, and started hiring additional developers.
...
We started our experience with co-op students on exactly the day we opened
our Montreal office. In fact, we had to ask our students to skip the
morning and show up at a restaurant for a "welcome lunch" around noon
because that was when the landlord of the new office was supposed to come by
to drop off the key. I had to run out during lunch to pick it
up. That was when I found out the restaurant we were eating at was a
6-minute brisk walk from the office, a fact I used frequently when
calculating my meeting schedules in the future.
That afternoon, Ikea delivered the first round of unassembled
furniture, which we all spent the rest of the day putting together.
The next day we got a load of computers shipped from our Markham
office so people could actually do work.
At that time the total set of employees in Montreal was me, Dave, one other
full-time developer, and four co-op students. I think having them assemble
their own furniture was probably when we started getting our reputation as
an interesting workplace for co-ops :)
...
Inside the company Ozzy and Greg took a hands-off policy towards our R&D.
In Ozzy's words, "If you keep delivering the right software, I'll stay off
your back. If I keep delivering the numbers, the investors will stay off my
back." So while we discussed the idea and people thought my job descriptions
were a bit crazy, nobody really objected. Besides, those were the days
right before the dot-com crash, so people were pretty willing to go for any
kind of quirkiness to get people's attention. And it worked, of course.
The technique was surprisingly effective. Despite our tiny size, we were as
well known among Waterloo co-op students as Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.
They had the big names, but we had the only job descriptions that were fun
to read and talk about. I heard at least one story of someone finding the
Evil Death Ray job posting printed out and taped to his dorm room door, with
a hand-scrawled note that said, "This is you exactly. Go apply, right now!"
We ended up hiring him.
That was the real magic of the job postings - they were quirky and
they sounded *difficult*, so they attracted a certain kind of person
that was much more likely to be the kind of person we wanted. That
meant sorting through fewer, higher quality resumes. A huge company
like Google or Microsoft couldn't really do that because they can't
afford to reduce their pool of applicants so much, but we were hiring
slowly so it was easier to just have the group be self-selecting.
...
We tried to keep our co-op to full-time ratio to about 1:1 (basically
a mentor for each student). I think that's a higher ratio than most
companies, except for the really exploitative ones (like web design
companies, which have *mostly* co-op students, underpay them, then
contract them out to their customers at a much higher rate).
Basically we had a different perspective on co-op than most companies,
because the two people organizing the R&D department had just finished
being co-op students a few months earlier. So we knew for sure that
co-op students are capable of doing great things with minimal
supervision - we were living examples!
At most companies, people jump to the conclusion that younger workers are
simply unreliable and inexperienced and will do bad work, so you can only
give them grunt work or simple tasks they can't possibly screw up. This
isn't really true. Students are certainly inexperienced, which means
they'll tend to make the wrong assumptions about what needs to be done and
how to do it. That's the part you have to watch. But they're also really
fast, really energetic, really flexible, and really eager to learn. So the
trick is to use a soft touch, make sure they have all the guidance available
that they want, but give them big, difficult things that keep them
motivated.
Ironically, we found that our co-ops often did some of our best work,
sometimes putting full-timers (even me :)) to shame. The thrill of
changing jobs every four months means that everything a co-op student
does is always interesting to them, while motivating full-timers is
actually much more difficult. I don't believe in asking people to
work 12-hour days and weekends, but co-ops get excited and do it all
by themselves, then they go back to school and tell all their friends
to apply with us next time because of the great flex hours. You can't
lose with logic like that!
...
My favourite part of our funny job descriptions was that they
implicitly gave people permission to send in funny job *applications*.
I have to admit that, even though it wasn't really fair, we always
gave special attention in interviews to people who had funny cover
letters. One person wrote us a cover letter entirely in perl. I
think Dave kept some of the funniest ones.
One student showed up for the interview wearing a tuxedo, wings, and
blasting the Star Wars Imperial March from a portable stereo. At Waterloo,
there's a big hallway with a bunch of rooms where different companies are
interviewing simultaneously. He missed our interview room by accident and
walked right past us looking for it. Our interviewer leaned out of the
doorway, pointed at him, and said, "Uh, you're probably looking for NITI,
right?" He was. He got hired, did excellent work, and (along with another
of our former co-ops) has gone on to found his own new software company in
Waterloo.
In more questionable news, our past co-op students have also been
responsible for the Waterloo
Pantsless movement.
April 27, 2007 14:06
