“We’ve decided that you can work in New York for the summer, give it a talk with your parents and we can move forward with this”

Or at least it went something like that. It was the beginning of Summer 2011 and I was always considering consulting as something I’d be interested in doing in the future. So I went and applied to a few consulting companies that were posted in my university site and despite some tempting offers including some California tech companies, I had decided that I’d give consulting a go, at a company called Infusion Development. The reason being that I felt that there’d be a lot of valuable experience in being able to work on several projects from end-to-end, and iterating with clients, especially given the fact that co-op terms are so darn short. This was especially true since I came from Sybase working on a massive product and really only building out a few dinky features with no real ownership in the product… not to say that it’s a bad thing, but it really wasn’t what I was looking for.

So the perks were pretty much everything I could hope for:

1. Free Housing? Check.
2. Monthly Food Stipend? Check.
3. Free flight, and not just a free flight, but free round-trip flights to Toronto every two weeks? Sign me up!

Then I arrived in New York and holy geez, everything is bigger here! So much to see and do, although work was pretty high up in the list. I’ll make it an easier read and discuss work and life as separate sections.

Work

Work as a Software Consultant was pretty fun. I got a lot of opportunities to talk directly with clients, but also did a ton of coding from ground-up, working largely on web applications.

The company was largely a Microsoft/C#/.NET sort of firm, but the practices employed and architecture were pretty modern and a lot more agile than most companies in the enterprise business. Staffing always seemed to be an issue in the company, as we attempted to find consultants of the required calibre and skillset for the project, although coming in as an intern I didn’t really have any of these frameworks under my belt, but I managed to pick it up pretty quickly regardless, despite all the frustrations I had to deal with using sparse documentation at times.

But when I think about it, that’s one thing I don’t really like about consulting and it’s the fact that people seem to use you specifically for your skillset and sometimes lose sight of the fact that as a developer you ought to be a generally good problem solver and capable of picking up the tools on the spot. But this really isn’t much of an option due to the fact that consulting rates are hourly and pretty darn hefty.

Work was pretty much “work-hard, play-hard” as I would work my butt off until 3 AM at points when the project deadline was around the corner. This was partially due to the fact that we were short on talent at times and definitely understaffed. But you could definitely see the “play-hard” part of the culture through the fact that everyone was young and pretty driven, and we’d end up going drinking or pool or whatever there was to do in New York (which is a heckuvalot, even at 3 AM), in the middle of work.

What’s next? Well, there were some aspects that I’ve liked from the work, namely the ownership I got in the projects, but also a lot of things I didn’t like so much with the technology, the nature of the company, and all the hassle of politics versus being able to actually do something. That’s why I’m pursuing a startup as my next co-op position since this is where I’ll probably find what I’ve been looking for.

Life and Culture in New York

Now comes the actual interesting part, haha. So what I’ve formulated up is that:

If there’s something you want to do, New York has it.

I really do mean that, but the best part of spending a long time in New York are all the experiences you end going through… not all the tourist-y things you get dragged on for bus tours, though that aspect is also a little fun but short-term which you can probably find on Yelp. But really, the best parts of NY can only be done by spending a relatively long time there, and off the top of my head some highlights include:

• Working until 8 PM, going out to pool and beer, and coming back to work until 3 AM… and waking up for 8:30 AM next day for a meeting with clients like a boss
• Getting hussled for what should have been free CD’s people were handing out
• Finishing work and going to a New Jersey mansion via “party bus”, and of course no shortage of alcohol that night
• Eating burritos everyday for probably two months, would have done it longer had I discovered the magic of Mexican food earlier
• Hording chicken nuggets from McDonald’s with the 20 for $5 deal in the US… it’s something you’d NEVER see in Canada
• Realizing that the secret telephone in Criff Dogs leads to a surprisingly disappointing bar
• Going to the Magic Johnson Harlem 9 Theater… surprisingly good seats and space and cheap, too, despite the ghetto name and location!

Coming from Toronto, I’m pretty used to the multicultural aspects of the city, but you can think of NY as a more lively, packed downtown Toronto. There are so many people from different places that you can try out a lot of different food (though I am not a big fan of asian food in the Big Apple, haven’t really found anything that can compare to most decent Toronto restaurants). Food there, unless it’s fast food, is considerably more expensive, but the quality of food in general is pretty high, especially if you’re willing to pay for it.

Going on a subway itself was a pretty interesting experience… there’re always trains running even at 3 in the morning, perfect for me being the night owl that I am. Heck, a lot of places are open at that time which made me a little disappointed coming back to Toronto to find that everything was closed when I went out at the same time.

Another aspect that I really did find interesting was how people kept talking about money and it really does reflect Paul Graham’s essays about Cities and Ambitions. Seems that irrelevant status symbols seem to be engrained in to the New York mindset. One noteable time, I was in an elevator dressed with a polo t-shirt and jeans (no clients that day), and a guy asked me if I lived in the building. I don’t know if he was trying to be offensive but I told him I was going to work and he asked me what I did and I told him that I was working as a Software Consultant which kind of threw him off based on his expressions. It’s not too uncommon to find this behaviour, especially coming from Hong Kong, but it’s a little surprising.

So would I want to live here? Probably not, I think the lack of space and culture is not quite there for me, though I’d love to spend relatively more time in New York either via co-op or projects, since there are so many things I’d still love to do and would love to meet more hackers at meetups which I disappointingly attended very few of. With that, I’m headed off to San Francisco for my upcoming work term and I’ll make sure to write and take pictures to share the experience.