software engineer

senior software engineer

software development specialist

analyst

developer

Blackberry

A typical day at work in the former Content Development Services business unit involved the writing and publishing of training documentation. The Instructor Led Training, Webinars, Web-based Training, user guides, reference manuals, video scripts, and other documents our unit delivered were used within the organization, with carrier-partners as part of New Product Support Readiness, and with product end users. A project could range from requiring a few hours of work before submission to the editing team, to being months in duration with heavy consultation of subject matter experts and potentially delivering a User Acceptance Trial. When I started, the review and publication of support articles for the internal and external knowledge base was something everybody did for at least an hour every day. Timewise, the expectation was that the salary amount was for a minimum 40-hour week, Monday to Friday, and if a deadline was urgent, you stayed until the work was done. A repercussion I observed was that co-op placement students and young, single employees were favoured over older employees who wanted or required work-life balance. Management did not seem particularly motivated or focused, and promotion seemed more based upon who than what candidates knew - of a half-dozen managers to whom I reported, about two seemed truly appropriate as people leaders. My co-workers were second-to-none - bright, creative, hard-working innovators to a person, good-humoured and pleasant, and really the strength of the organization. The hardest part of the job was not becoming disillusioned by constantly shifting project and organizational demands, and a tendency to have meetings for the sake of having meetings. The most enjoyable part of my work there was the interaction with great people in an environment that was conducive, almost until the end, to the production of high quality work.

Responsible for ensuring quality of service between the device and proprietary infrastructure
communication, working closely with other platform and BlackBerry Infrastructure team within the
organization to implement and support device communication at global scale.
•	Understand the functional and business requirements of the project during the requirements review sessions with various teams and provide sign off from QA perspective. 
•	Provide effort estimation for QA related activities as a part of a given project. 
•	Build Test Plan and test cases based on the Functional Requirements, Technical Specification and Use Cases using different techniques 
•	Lead functional, integration, regression and end to end testing.
•	Work with business to develop business acceptance criteria during BUAT, provide the necessary support with test environment, test data etc and address the issues encountered.
•	Actively involved in quality assurance testing, tracking and managing defects.
•	Work closely with business analysts and development leads for troubleshooting defects.
•	Lead proper test environment setup and support during end to end testing and co-ordinate with different teams
•	Document and report test results and issues to upper management 
•	Conducted Interviews for co-ops and provided knowledge transfer/training on different test domains 
•	Managed and supervised Software test team consisting of several co-ops and interns and accountable for their task assignment and other activities
•	Linux Shell Scripting in Ubuntu operating system, standardizing and documenting configuration files  
•	Skills Used and learned: Requirements Analysis, Requirements Gathering, QA Effort Estimation, Data Analysis, SRS, UAT, Efficient Time Management. 
•	Environment: IIS server, Windows, Jira, MKS, QNX platform, Blackberry devices.

My typical day at work: 
Being in an Agile environment, we would start off with a daily SCRUM and outline any obstacles, accomplishments we've made. I would ask for and offer help where needed.
Once the meeting is complete, we would engage with the team in picking up our daily tasks and work in a highly interactive environment to accomplish the tasks in a multi-disciplinary team. The tasks would be bug fixes, customer escalations, support, requirement refining with the product managers, features work (either independent or working with a team-mate). 

What I learned:
I learned teamwork, accountability, producing solid solutions and code, Java, C++, QT, time management, Telephony.

The management was fairly hands-off as the team was always self-motivated setting strict targets and deadlines which were in sync with product. Managers were great at dealing with other teams when requirements needed to get across. 

The co-workers were fun to be around, and were very supportive and helpful when getting things done, or just bouncing off ideas. It mostly didn't feel like work.  

The toughest part about the job was dealing with constantly changing requirements from product/customers and shortened timelines. Though, it was a challenge that was worth overcoming every time because the rewards of satisfying the customers was high.

The most enjoyable part of the job were the people, and the social interactions, especially as there were multiple locations. Finding solutions to complex problems while engaged with multiple engineers, especially when dealing with so many environment parameters was always fun.

A normal day of work start with preparing the SMT line, verifing (on the computers) the programs you are about to run,,then preparing the printers, inspect the PCB's (that is printed circuit boards) then print samples , inspect samples with the visual solder inspecting machine, if needs correction , you work on them, if everything fine , the printed boards takes the long road to the SMT machines to be populated with the components needed for the specifical program you use.( Very important is scanning the line-SMT machines for the right program). Meanwhile you troubleshoot the machines if neccesary, paying constantly atention to the boards populated make sure that the parts machine place are in the right spots and perfectly in their places. Last inspection before the convection oven , then the populated boards  go through the oven, the end of the oven you have the final SMT product, who needs 100 percent inspection using the right diagrams and computer program, After the boards are electronically tested and they pass you feel the happiness that you were great that day.. i guess that is the most enjoyable part of the job. RIM management was ok for the first 10 years, after went down the hill a bit.. Co-workers were good skilled people, most of them fun to work with. 
what i learned with Blackberry? The most important things, Teamwork. Extreme attention to details, computer skills, and SMT.

Great place to work. I was on coop here so I was treated the same as an employee and got a great salary, benefits, days off, etc. Contractors on the other hand get the short end of the stick. I would love to work for BB again but not sure if I wanted to deal with being a contractor there. They do not hire a lot of actual employees so the positions are coveted if you can get them. As for job security it is a little iffy as they laid off about half their workforce while I was there including some members of my team. It is a scary thing to go through. Hopefully they will bounce back as a company because working there was a blast.

They really do look out for work/life balance at BlackBerry. They have decent vacation time and "BlackBerry days" around Christmas to cover the days that are not stats so almost everyone can take Christmas off (only a few essential personal have to work during holidays). If you want to volunteer they may even pay you your regular wage to do so (I got to volunteer at We Day for Free the Children in Waterloo and got paid as if I was working the day). 

The software testing teams are great and I had a blast working for them. Trying to "break" the software and find defects before OS builds were launched was a lot of fun. Team outings were great as was the coop social committee.

Wages are very good. As a coop student I got paid the same as a regular employee and made $64k/year before overtime. Overtime opportunists are frequent in the testing department so you can make very good money there.

My professional career at BlackBerry thus far has assisted me with growing in experience and knowledge in many areas including: working under tight deadlines, oral and written communication skills, critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills, as well as organizational, time management and multi-tasking. These are all areas in which I continue to show great strength. All of the above skills have given me an opportunity to show employers my strengths, which has also given employers the confidence to put me in positions of greater responsibility and leadership.

I have been given many wonderful opportunities to grow in leadership roles which I demonstrated by starting and leading the Social Committee for my department. 

I have the utmost respect for my bosses and my colleagues. I have been the Executive Assistant to the Vice President, two directors and the Senior Vice President and have demonstrated very strong time management, organizational and problem solving skills. 

The most enjoyable part of my position would have to be the people I work with. I feel very blessed to have met everyone I work with and really enjoy the work hard and have fun environment that BlackBerry Security promotes.

A typical day as Value Stream Project Manager Assistant was updating and verifying test statuses using excel spreadsheet and various databases as we received 30 to 50 new test submissions per week. Wrote test reports and closed completed test requests. I updated work instructions and procedures that were scheduled for yearly review for my Manager. Also assisted Project managers with sending completed test submissions back to requestors. Worked on gathering data from database for time studies for Six Sigma Green Belt Projects.  
I learned about the organizational abilities required to keep the tests moving through the Lab efficiently, detailed features of our inventory system, the various new products being developed and their new features.
Management was open and involved, trying to improve processes for efficient use of time. Co-workers were friendly and knowledgeable,  always willing to help.
The hardest part of the job was dealing with incorrect database entries or no updates performed. The most enjoyable part of my job was the variety of functions I got to perform, working with a very skilled group of people and being able to assist many people.

Typical day at work started off with reviewing your list of priority collections and due dates.  Prioritizing and deciding what action to take on the accounts in the 30-60 day and 45-90 day range.  Once you made the necessary actions on the oldest accounts you then started to make contact with as many of the 15-30 day accounts as you could to start the collection process off immediately to capture payments so these accounts would not move further.

There really wasn't any environment for fostering co-worker relationships, you sat in a cubical from am to pm with very little interaction.  

The best part about this position was I learned how to deal with customer/clients on many levels extensively.  I did have one of the highest success rates in our department for collecting overdue accounts.  I took great pride in my ability to work well with customers and resolve issues for them as well as the company. 

I really didn't like the lack of security, almost all positions in this department were on a month to month basis through temporary placements.

Overall I would say that working at BlackBerry was very educational for me. I've learned a lot about Social Media applications, and usage of it in the market when it comes to Mobile devices. I also learned to set different user expectations for Mobile user, compare to Desktop one.
Learned lots of cool technologies, such as NLP, ASR and others
Direct management is usually fine. Never had a problem with a manager. Management usually listen and accepts, as well as direct and dictate when needed.
My team was awesome ! sorry - all my teams where such! the collaboration between Dev and Test is working very well.
There's much work to do at Blackberry, and if you don't mind putting some extra hours at times, you'll do just fine.
Many of the people at Blackberry enjoy either PIng Pong, Foosbal, or board games. You will find lots of people bringing their lunch or bringing their own to the cafeteria, and play a game, or just talk.

When I was brought onboard, the company was already being described as a sinking ship but only when I got to working on the inside did I realize that everyone had a vision that they were working hard to execute upon and bring to life. Management was very precise as to what they wanted and because of a lot of the cutbacks, I was involved in many cross departmental projects and as a result of this it gave a meaningful understanding of what I was doing and how exactly it affected the organization. Despite the negative media storm around the company, day to day activities were the same and seldom did it affect anything work related. Management definitely encouraged and wanted their employees to learn more and excel in their own professional careers and offered lots of training in order to better attain these goals.

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