Ask HN: Consultants in Montreal willing to let me shadow them?

[apkallum]

Shadowing is an excellent way to learn how experts work. Sadly it's mostly overlooked. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to shadow a consultant/senior engineer, and I'm willing to use my skills to help them in day to day operations.

Further details can be discussed by email - mine is in my profile.

Edit: Wikipedia link for those wondering what shadowing is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_shadow

[sytse]

We have shadowing but only for team-members shadowing myself https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/

Cool to see other people realizing the value of shadowing, I hope you find someone.

And for people considering to be shadowed: it is an easy way to help someone, you act better, and you tend to learn from the shadows questions.

[apkallum]

It seems that Quebec is now a place you can hire from, so I guess I have to start by applying for a job at Gitlab then. :)

It's wonderful you have this initiative - Gitlab seems to lead by example in many progressive practices.

[thooranpoyi]

Isn't it Québec anti business and with arcane language laws ? Why would anyone start a business or hire someone from Québec ?

[antoineMoPa]

What? The tech scene in Montreal is far from small. The "régions" also have a huge number of startups, funding, incubators, collaboration with local universities, etc. Language/politics don't keep us from working together.

[mechatrocity]

Did you have a bad experience in QC or something?

[pilooch]

Very interesting, thanks for pointing to this. Gitlab appears to be doing a fantastic job a opening governance and writing FAQ-like content such as this one. Truely boosting the core values and interest of libre / open source software and it's business models.

[Jugurtha]

I once interned at Schlumberger, a company that describes this as "Internships That Don't Involve Photocopying". It was great in the sense that I was put with extremely experienced engineers and some nuggets have stayed with me.

I was helping an engineer when he was cleaning some tools and tagging them as part of a procedure. We were talking about the task at hand and I asked him if he found it boring. He said "It is boring, the most boring part of the job. But it's also the most important. You clean, calibrate, and tag the tools so that the next time a job comes, you or someone else know the tool is good and has been checked.".

When I joined my current company as an engineer, I thought about it in terms of documentation and knowledge dissemination so other contributors or my future self may benefit and I had started a technical knowledge base.

Now I'm COO (and CTO by interim: first CTO quit, subsequent CTO doing military service), we make sure to include new team members in communication with clients (emails, calls, or meetings), invite them to contribute to the exchange, involve them in the whole process of making the product, from elicitation to business viability of a feature and engineering trade-offs, to running the company and the business side of things. Many of our engineers are still students and have been with us for years, and we're doing this in the hope that they learn how to make products and run companies that would die otherwise, as opposed to be in companies that'd do well regardless of their presence. They learn to operate with a broader range than only fixing bugs (but still managing to fix the darn bugs).

I then started an "Operations" knowledge base called "Operator's Manual" shared on GitLab. I put in all the things I had to learn how to do as I took over so we wouldn't have that problem again if something happens to me or I'm fired and any employee can pick up the thing and be able to somewhat operate the company and have a starting point.

It has information about the company, hiring (from how to receive a candidate and asking if they'd like something to drink to onboarding), firing, taxes and how and where to pay them, invoices and the legal texts they must comply with, etc.

It became a "Handbook" that is augmented as we continue to learn things and build an organization. You can imagine how delighted I was when I found out that GitLab had such a handbook on GitLab on how GitLab is run : )

[apkallum]

That's great to hear. I have had the same impulse when I joined the previous organization I worked for - documenting how things are done not just by me, but by as many parts of the organization as possible. Managers were impressed by the idea but no one would like to do it themselves, you had to interview them one by one haha.

[atemerev]

I am a consultant software engineer who works in multiple exciting fields (algorithmic trading, complex networks analysis, open source intelligence analysis). I live and work in Geneva, but I happen to be in Montreal for two weeks starting next Tuesday, so perhaps we could find a common ground. I'll write you.

[mfalcon]

Hi Alexander, could I get un contact with you? Id like to name you some questions if possible.

[atemerev]

Sure, my email is in my profile.

[apkallum]

Sounds wonderful, will wait for your email.

[moltar]

Consultants in what field?

[apkallum]

Software, sorry if it wasn't clear.

[diehunde]

What's shadowing?

[thooranpoyi]

Who would in their right sense will work in IT in Montreal ?

Isn't Québec anti immigrant and bad for any kind of business other than a Québecois one ?

I mean the language laws, anti immigrant and right wing CAQ with the recent religious ban law. Shitty noisy apartments, highest income taxes and crumbling infrastructure including lack of healthcare professionals.

[srgpqt]

I’ve lived in montreal snd quebec city, have visited and considered working in many other cities and countries, yet I find that it is mostly worse everywhere else, or at best on par. Not that quebec is perfect or anything.

[digianarchist]

Montreal is very different than the rest of Quebec.