More focus time, Less overtime: Lessons from Working Remotely at Procurify as a Software Engineer Co-op
By: Sandy Wu
Tags: Internship Experience, Co Op, Remote Work, Remote Culture, Procurify

Procurify office’s gather.town simulation.

My experience working at Procurify has exceeded my expectations of what I thought co-op was supposed to be like in terms of culture, mentorship and sense of belonging.

I am currently a 4th-year Computing Science student at Simon Fraser University. With no prior experience in cloud infrastructure, I found myself placed on the Lumberjacks Team, a team whose mission is to empower engineering teams to deliver their work quickly and effectively with safe and reliable infrastructure. I was given the opportunity to manage multiple aspects of the application’s infrastructure including our Circle CI build pipeline, Kubernetes resources and AWS components. I felt that I was able to contribute as a valuable member on the team and learn a ton as well. I really appreciated the growth mindset that Procurify had when supporting their less experienced team members and I hope that future co-ops will have a similar experience working here as well!

During my co-op work terms here at Procurify, I had the pleasure of working remotely without ever seeing my teammates in person due to the great plague of 2020 (jk it was just Coronavirus :’( ). I wasn’t sure what I expected out of working remotely other than the fact that there would be no more noisy open-concept floor plans and fewer team-building events. During my stay at Procurify, I noticed that the team culture was, in fact, far from dead. I recognized the effort that was put into fun company-wide events that I have not seen before coming to Procurify, including weekly virtual meditation sessions, bi-weekly Donut meetups with random people around the company and a holiday-themed spirit week packed with costume contests and drink-making tutorials. Procurify did well in making the team feel more connected despite the physical distancing restrictions.

My submission for the holiday card contest. It is a drawing of my and my team mates receiving infrastructure and test tools from Santa (our manager, Ben) for Christmas.

All of our direct communication was done through Slack and Zoom Meetings. To have some semblance of human interaction, my team turns on their cameras during stand-ups. To this day, I’m still not sure if it was a requirement, but it oddly kept us at a certain degree of sane and seeing new Zoom backgrounds has always been a great conversation starter. When the Procurify office’s gather.town simulation was released, we did a few of our meetings in the virtual office to spice things up. Although the gather.town experiment was short-lived, it was through these little changes to our routines that helped make my remote experience more memorable and engaging. In regards to the countless times of being nominated as the designated demo presenter, the uneasiness didn’t ever go away when it came to having close to 45 watchful gazes in a convenient grid format. Regardless, I very much appreciated the support I got from my team when it came to my work and it was also a relief to hear that I got better at demo-ing each time.

The unofficial Slack emoji for my team at Procurify. Source.

With Slack as our main communication tool, it paved the way for lots of good technical discussions in the engineering channels and threads. As a co-op student trying to take advantage of as many learning opportunities as possible, this open communication helped me define what good teamwork looked like in practice and gain more visibility on how everyone comes together to solve critical application problems. I recognized the strides of courage it took from my teammates to ping the rest of the engineering team, or even the entire company, about frequent status updates without the fear of being too aggressive. The results have tremendously helped less-experienced team members, such as myself, in learning how our more senior coworkers digest a problem and begin to debug it.

Procurify was great in many respects when it came to its transition to remote work. It was evident that the level of enthusiasm in consistently finding ways to improve the current processes was high and the amount of impact and change that one team member could make was limitless. Since distractions, such as stressful morning commutes and the noisy guy yelling from the other end of the office, were no longer applicable, I found that I was able to keep to my 9 to 5 schedule on most days while still fulfilling my daily goals. As I had started my journey at Procurify without ever working at its beautiful Vancouver downtown office, I was made unaware of all the positive aspects that I could’ve been missing out on while being contained in my makeshift home office. All in all, I admired Procurify’s ability to quickly adjust to the current events and further capitalize on the great advantages of remote work.