Michel Billard

During my final year at the University I was, as a good student, actively looking for a company to hire me. Since I had good grades and I knew I was a great prospect, I went for companies that seemed to be the best for my future. By that I mean a company where I would learn a lot, have plenty of great mentors around me, offer a lot of possibilities for advancement and where resources would not be an issue. Let’s just say that my definition for that has changed quite a bit since I started working in a startup. Oracle seemed to offer all of this: plenty of senior developers around, plenty of management levels and I think it’s safe to say that Oracle isn’t short on money.

I applied at a few other companies but none seemed to offer the level of professionalism Oracle could offer (except Google but I did not get a position there). However, the Google story is for another post.

Everything was going well with Oracle, I had already applied there for an internship but I did not take the position because I had to accept or reject another job before I received any feedback from them (more about the internship process in a future post), however after 3-4 interviews I guess I was not doing too bad. I did all their interviews and after a lengthy process they told me I was chosen for the position. Unfortunately, there was a catch: I first had to go through their background investigation process which is standard procedure for big corporations and their headquarters in California (I was applying for a position in Montreal) had to approve the expense.

The background investigation took a lot of time because my references were either in vacation or did not know how to return a phone call (and I was in vacation so it was difficult to handle all the communications), but it finally came to an end positively. This was very tedious but it’s usually a fairly straightforward process which just happened to hit all the obstacles.

By the time the background investigation had ended (about two months after being told I was their candidate of choice) they had not yet received any new information about my approval from the headquarters. The office in Montreal could not hire me before this was completed and approved and my contact did not have access to information about the time frame this would take (or could not tell me). I was told this usually take a few weeks sometimes up to two months, but this had already taken over two months and they did not know how much longer it would take. Everything else was done and approved, all they needed was an approval for my salary.

I was optimistic that the approval request would eventually get through soon since everything else was done so I decided I would wait and take the free time as vacation. However the months passed and by mid-summer, four months after being “chosen”, I was running low on money and I finally gave up hope on them, I would have to find another job. Luckily for me, in a matter of two weeks I had found a new job and things turned out pretty good.

I did not hear from them for a month or two after being hired at Hint Innovation. My contact at Oracle called me in fall offering me the “chance” to apply for another position at Oracle. They didn’t offer me a job, they offered me the opportunity to waste my time again, just like last time.

No thanks.

P.S.: For those wondering about the error number, it’s the date of the post.

After my third year at the Polytechnique de Montréal, I went for an internship at a gaming company. I’ve always liked video games but I wasn’t sure if I would really like working in the domain so an internship was the perfect solution.

As some of you may know, Gameloft is a rather big player in the cellphone games market and is known worldwide. It is also affiliated with the giant Ubisoft. That makes Gameloft a good entry point for real gaming development positions (programming cellphone games isn’t especially thrilling).

My tasks consisted of porting a version of a game that worked (and was released or approved for release) on a particular cellphone to another very similar cellphone. Most of the time, it was very boring and didn’t involve much thinking from me. I must say that I didn’t learn a lot in terms of programming knowledge. However, I did learn a lot about project and team management, bug reporting as well as versioning.

The hierarchy was just right at Gameloft, porters worked under a team lead who was assigned a producer who makes the final decisions regarding bugs and features (to let a bug in the game if it is not worth fixing for example). The management overhead was not excessive at all, we only had meetings when it was really needed and I was not constantly monitored while working.

They used a few tools that I now find necessary for the success of a project or organization. The first one is their in-house bug tracking application which I used daily and helped tracking the progress of my projects. The second one was the company wiki. I will talk more about it in a future post, but this tool, as hard as it may be to get it started (because it needs contributors) proved itself very useful for documentation.

The last major skill I learned (I should say perfected) was versioning (or source control). They used a quite standard branches-tags-trunk process (well more of a tags-trunk process in practice) which I was not familiar with before working there. This is an important skill that should be taught in schools. The only thing I remember from University regarding source control was using one trunk where everyone commits its work (they did suggest not to commit breaking changes though).

Working at Gameloft might not have been the most thrilling experience and I did not learn a lot from a technological point of view, but the knowledge I got about everything orbiting around the coding tasks was immense.

For a little more than a year, I’ve been working at a startup called Hint Innovation. I was their first employee and it has been a tremendous experience that I hope will continue for a long time. The two co-founders are actual computer/software engineers too and have a lot of expertise in the business and financials domains.

Since we were only 3 developers when we started, I had a lot of responsibilities and it didn’t take long before I had my own projects. I could take part of the design portion (probably my favorite one) of the software even though I was just fresh out of the University. I did not expect to have an impact on the design and architecture of the applications so quickly after graduating. Even though I knew I could bring something good, I just thought the corporate world would have me wait for my turn. The startup life is really something to look for if you want to do more than just programming.

Together, we’ve been working on developing software products using the latest trend in software engineering, domain-driven design. Before working there I had never heard anything about the concept, but I can assure you that this is what OO programming was created for. The main aspect of domain-driven design is that it helps manage complexity. The applications we build are very complex, yet it’s very easy to understand how it works underneath and fixing bugs or adding features is a breeze.

At the beginning of this summer (2008), I had the chance to experience managing and leading for a small project. We had an intern for the summer (who just renewed for fall) and, because of some time constraints, I was the one who would teach him and give him assignments. This was an amazing experience, the (internal) project turned out really good and we will be using and improving it for a long time.

Finally, I just want to say how glad I am to have decided to take the risk with the company (there’s always a risk when going for a small 2 people company), I have learned so much in that year and I can truly say that I love my job.