It all started with a broken computer

The company sent me a laptop, which arrived a couple of days before I officially started working. Besides the laptop, they also sent a series of peripherals. Everything was brand new except for the computer. My roommate took the mouse to play League of Legends… However, just as I was about to turn on the computer, I found it was broken. So, after spending an afternoon on the phone with IT, they finally decided to send me a replacement and postpone my start date for a day (due to waiting for the equipment).

Turns out, BlackBerry is not a phone company

It was only after working at BlackBerry that I realized BlackBerry had long stopped its phone business. In fact, BlackBerry originally focused on encrypted communications, with phones being just a supplementary product. At that time, during the unstable era of telecom operators, BlackBerry phones seized the enterprise and personal user markets with their own mobile network. Now, BlackBerry mainly provides encrypted communication software to enterprises and is also researching car infotainment systems. If you want to know more about BlackBerry, you can check out this article source: Technology Daily Post.

In simple terms, now that telecom networks are stable enough and users value flexibility in their usage, BlackBerry’s system appears cumbersome. On the other hand, car infotainment systems now require this stability to avoid being hacked (of course, provided they can ensure their brakes work well, no whipping here).

However, car infotainment falls under the QNX department, which is not my department. But as a BlackBerry employee, I immediately felt BlackBerry’s commitment to security. All files must be encrypted using the BlackBerry Workspace, and employees must download BlackBerry AtHoc on their phones to ensure they can still receive company messages in the event of a major disaster. What bothers me the most is that Cisco AnyConnect VPN must use the provided 2FA and can only be used on company-authorized devices, which includes the laptop given to me by the company.

Complaining about the bureaucracy brought by large enterprises

Talking about the laptop, they later sent me a newer model, but with hardly any difference from the previous one. It’s bigger and bulkier. Personally, I think after graduation, I’ll go for a startup, where the corporate culture is more open and less strict on such matters. I always feel that the side effects of large enterprises are more cumbersome processes and more effort to understand various systems within the company. For instance, when dealing with the broken laptop issue, the email was first sent to the team handling shipments, then to my team leader, then to the IT department, and then the IT department contacted me… But it seems to be the norm with clear division of labor in large enterprises.

In my employee system, I was assigned quite a lot of tasks, mainly about familiarizing myself with the company’s intranet systems and many mandatory courses to take. Such as Workplace Harassment, Personal Health, File Confidentiality, and more. (I haven’t finished them yet, and they expire on the 25th, G)

I changed my mind, large enterprises are great after all

Hahaha, free Udemy courses for employees, what a treat! Courses I hesitated to buy before, I can now study them to my heart’s content, it’s just so satisfying. Even the free courses are not part of the employee benefits (probably because employees don’t like studying once they start working), the real perks are in the Perks section. Since the headquarters is in Waterloo, many restaurants there offer discounts. And we can also get internal prices for many electronic products of the company (Apple, Dell, HP…). There are probably more employee benefits when we go back to the office.

So, what am I here to do exactly?

The first week was mainly about figuring out what I, as a new employee at the company, should do and understanding BlackBerry. It wasn’t until the second week that I started getting to know the other members of my Team and slowly understanding what a Service Engineer actually does - basically, the DevOps of BlackBerry.

BlackBerry seems to always hire Co-op students (after all, the headquarters is in Waterloo, and the CEO is a Waterloo graduate, even my interviewer who interviewed me last year during Co-op was a Co-op student turned full-time employee after graduation). They already have a complete system in place to welcome Co-op students. They first held a meeting for all Co-op students, around 150 in total, then to each department, and then to each team. According to my team leader, our department hires 6 Co-op students per semester, and whoever team needs more hands will take in a recruit. (Looking at my team, it seems we do need more hands, as someone left when I joined, and it coincided with the shutdown of the phone business, all towards the end of the year). I was assigned a Co-op buddy, who I can directly ask any questions. In the summer semester of last year, my team had another Co-op student, but according to my buddy, that student was 30 years old, came back to Waterloo University for a Master’s degree… and his assigned buddy was a Chinese employee (judging from the name and accent).

It’s obvious that they don’t have very high expectations for me, a freshman, as a CS senior told me, “Don’t expect me to do shit.” Until now, they haven’t given me any assignments, just giving me time to familiarize myself with the systems. Next week, they plan to have a meeting to discuss what exactly I should be doing.

A strange coincidence

As mentioned earlier, my Team is short-staffed, and it’s all because BlackBerry discontinued its phone services, mainly services provided to phones, and my Team is called Service Engineering. You can easily imagine where this task falls on (yes, my Team), and this task is definitely not something that can be solved with just a flip of a switch. The dozens of emails in my inbox can attest to this point. The good news is they had almost finished by the time I joined, but the bad news is that this interruption has derailed our main tasks, and with an employee leaving, my Team is currently very short-handed. And all I can do at this point is watch from the sidelines… and still not fully understand…

Thank you, Outlook

I’ve never seen a four-digit inbox count before. My employee inbox is filled with these things:

• System update information sent automatically by the servers
• Build information sent by the server management
• Information from other departments requesting work from our Team
• Gitlab’s new commit information
• Company-scheduled meetings
• Team-scheduled meetings
• Emails from my team leader and other team members

The quantity of these emails varies from most to least. I think you can see the problem here - how do I find those important emails among so many?! Those that directly address me and require my response.

Let’s say together: Thank you, Outlook. It’s the first time I’ve found Outlook’s Rule function so useful. After creating around 7-8 rules, my inbox became more organized. My buddy told me that in his first Co-op term, he had a five-digit email count, which is somewhat terrifying.

Breaking through my learning barrier for the first time

Both my buddy and team leader are very enthusiastic and have been guiding me these past two weeks, encouraging me to learn this and that. My buddy even live-streamed the process of deploying a service while explaining it to me. The team leader arranged two afternoons for training on Chef usage. Fearing I might not keep up, before watching my buddy deploy and attending the training sessions, I spent half a day studying what they were doing as a preview. Now looking back, if I hadn’t studied those things, I truly wouldn’t have understood what they were doing.

Giving a few knocks on the head to my past semester self

It seems like all my colleagues here assume I know how to use Vim, understand bash syntax, know about Unix systems, have basic knowledge of network protocols (like SSH, HTTP, HTTPS), are proficient in Git, understand virtualization and VM. If I hadn’t randomly self-studied these things last semester, I would probably be struggling this week.

The first Payroll

Today is the day I get my first payroll. However, I feel like I haven’t contributed much to the team or the company. I’ve pretty much just observed for two weeks, and they’re still paying me. There’s a feeling of not deserving this pay, and the excitement is somehow gone.

Wow, my department manager just sent me an email, so I better go finish the remaining courses they assigned me. See you next month~