Job Update and a Concurrency Rant

Well, it looks like the early bird catches the worm. After my roommates and I took this inconvenient online course introducing us to Carleton Universities Co-op program and multiple presentations and resume workshops later, I’ve finally done it. I’ve landed myself a prestigious 8-month co-op at ZDirect, a global company that produces hotel marketing automation software. Development is exclusively done in their downtown Ottawa site and sales offices are around the world.

Since Carleton’s Career and Co-op department uses a web-based job portal by Orbis Communications, and the fact that students like to procrastinate and leave everything to the last day that things are due, the résumé and cover letter uploading process has a flaw where if there are many users trying to concurrently upload their documents, this “document converter” would stall and not let you progress through the application process. My roommates and I started panicking and thinking of ways to fix it. One of my suggestions was to call up Carleton’s Computing Services (CCS) and order them a pizza in exchange for having them reboot the server. Unfortunately after giving CCS a call, they said the servers were managed by the Careers and Co-op department. Dead end there since it was already 9:30 pm and no one would be at the office.

I decided to compromise and find emails of hiring managers for my top 10 choices. Long story short, I emailed ZDirect that night, had an interview with them the very next day (that went very well), and got a phone call the day after with a job offer.

Lesson of the day: have a backup plan and design and test your concurrent systems very well!