4 Months, 4 Desks: The League Co-op Experience
As a current software developer on the tail end of my four-month co-op term at League, I look back on all the growth, laughs, memories made and feel that it is fitting to write this post in an attempt to capture the experience of being a co-op at League.
Note: the title “4 months, 4 desks” is in reference to the fact that I’ve had 4 different desks already which I think sums up how fast things move at League.
“What is League?”
To provide some background to those unfamiliar, League is an employee benefits platform that integrates with complicated insurance, company HR, and enrollment systems. It consolidates these old and hard to manage structures into a piece of modern software that is simple to use for both the HR administrators and the employees enjoying the benefits themselves. On top of that, League also offers a health program that encourages overall well-being with daily health goals, a live health concierge connecting members to registered nurses, as well as a marketplace where members can purchase items with League credit among other forms of payment and spending accounts. Altogether, it provides an end to end platform that combines benefits and health. In a broader view, it provides a competitive edge to companies trying to recruit top talent in an ever-growing employee focused landscape.
Aside from the above sales pitch, League is also a place that people eagerly go to every day to help fulfill their mission statement of “empowering people to live healthier, happier lives. Every day”.
Nestled in the 8th floor in Metrocentre overlooking beautiful Roy Thompson Hall, League HQ is a sweet place.
Being a health-focused company, it should go without saying that employees are treated well. With desks that are motorized to be fully adjustable and can be turned into a standing desk with the press of a button, fully stocked snack cabinets and fridges, beer and wine on tap for the weekly Thursday Town Halls and Product Demo Fridays, massage room in office, beautiful seating areas, Leaguers are pampered. I realized this early on in the term when we had our new year kick off with popcorn and juice… in the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
“What’s the work like?”
A good workplace is more than just perks though. League is a place where people can try new things, take ownership of their work, fail without ridicule, and ultimately grow. I have personally felt all of these things first hand in the short time that I’ve been here.
As part of League’s co-op program, I was paired with a senior developer, Connor, from day one to be my ‘mentor’. This meant that I was on whatever team he was on and moved with him when/if he moved teams. I would go to the meetings he went to and learn what it was like to be a full-time employee. I would also go to him with any questions/issues I had and have weekly check-ins to discuss both the current work to be done as well as personal and career growth in general.
Compared to a typical manager setup, the mentor program definitely allowed me to develop more since it felt like I had someone who was there to help me succeed versus someone who was “assigned” to me. I also liked that over time, as I matured as a member of the team, I no longer needed to be so tied to the hip to my mentor and felt like I was functioning more like a regular full-time employee instead of just the co-op.
As a frontend developer within my team, one of my favourite parts of my work (aside from just getting 100x better at React) is working closely with designers and being introduced to design thinking as a whole. Before League, I’d always thought of design as the “look” of things. While it definitely does cover that, I’ve come to learn that design is a way of thinking about product usage and ties closer to product management that I ever would have thought.
Every Wednesday at League, we have something called Design Review which is basically an hour where various designers show what they’ve been working on and get critique from a diverse audience. The designers provide context on the usage of what they’re showing/stakeholders/things still in progress/etc, and attendees in the room, regardless of their own position within League, can walkthrough mockups and provide their comments or just learn more about happenings in the company.
I make an effort to attend every week (especially when the showcased designs are things that I will eventually work on) and I’ve found it such a great opportunity to see how the pros approach design, the considerations they take, and the iterative processes involved. It’s not every company that has this kind of weekly review panel, much less open it up to co-ops.
“Are there other co-ops?”
Whew, that’s a lot of writing from me just now so I’ll let my fellow engineering team co-ops take it away here for a bit.
James Nicolas, 3rd year at University of Waterloo, 4th co-op term:
What’s your position at League?
Platform Developer Co-op
Walk us through your average day at League
I come in at 10 and then go to the kitchen to get either an iced coffee or water with lemon. I might also get some cereal. Then I start development. Team standup is at 11:50 and then it’s lunchtime. I usually go down to the Metrocentre and get California Thai or something.
(note from the author: I can attest to this, James has a ton of California Thai)
Then I usually have a meeting about Kubernetes or security. Then I get a snack, usually almonds or seaweed. I continue dev until 6, either in Kubernetes or full-stack or both. I spend a lot of time in the Google cloud console. After 6, sometimes talk with other devs who stay late until 6:30. During the week I go to every town hall, and most demos, I have team retrospectives and planning on Thursdays and Fridays.
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about Kubernetes at League, could you briefly explain it to those of us who don’t quite know what it is?Kubernetes is a cloud-portable container and microservice platform, those are all just buzzwords, but here’s how it has the biggest impact for us (at League). We have a couple of main goals on the platform team currently which are to reduce cost and deployment time. We can achieve these goals by:
- load balancing requests to the multiple containers
- automatically provisioning and de-provisioning containers as needed by CPU/memory usage
- concurrently deploying all of our services
Kubernetes can manage all of that for us and abstracts the “how” part away. We just write some YAML files that describe what we want and Kubernetes will take care of the rest. Another benefit is infrastructure as code, which makes maintainability, collaboration, and repeatability much easier.
Wow, that sounds complicated. What’s your favourite part about working at League?
The hype, there’s always talk about signing on another company or making big deals. There’s a lot of TV’s that just constantly display achievements and prospects. I guess just being a part of something like this feels really good.
Totally agree. Last question, what’s your go-to Ritual spot? (Ritual is a food ordering app we use, every Wednesday, we all get $10 credit to spend)
Sushi Shop (I go to California Thai a lot but I don’t go there on ritual days).
Charles Zhang, 2nd year at University of Waterloo, 2nd co-op term:
What’s your position at League?
Full Stack Developer Co-op on the Integrations and Reporting Team
Walk us through your average week at League
On Monday, we (Integrations team) do planning which gets all the tasks prioritized for the week. We then start working on assigned tickets and clarify requirements with product managers if needed.
While coding and building features, we meet with Product Designers to ensure the feature looks good design-wise. As well, I attend the bi-weekly frontend meetings and weekly architecture meetings. I have 1-on-1’s with my mentor every week too. On a good week, I’ll also demo the work I’ve been doing at the weekly Friday product team demos.
Sounds busy, what’s your favourite part about working at League?
Everyone is super friendly and happy to help
Go to Ritual spot?
It’s a different spot every week!
Vab Kapoor, 3rd year at University of Waterloo, 3rd co-op term:
What’s your position at League?
Full Stack Developer Co-op on the Enrolment team
Walk us through your average day at League
At the start of my day, I look at tickets I have assigned to me and make a plan on how to tackle each ticket and how I should prioritize them in the day, along with other tasks that need to be done. After this, I join my team stand-up to hear about what they’ve been working on and share what I’ve been doing.
From this point onwards I try to get to work or attend meetings if there are any. Such meetings could include team planning/preplanning/retro, multi-team meetings, and of course town hall!
That sounds organized! What’s the coolest part of the work you do?
Something really cool about my job is the ability to leave a real impact on the company and team. I’m doing lots of work which directly impacts clients and helps my team and not just minor things that customers never see.
Awesome to hear, what’s your favourite part about working at League?
My favourite part of working at League is definitely town hall. It’s great to hear about the achievements of the company and what everyone else has been doing throughout the week. The refreshments and snacks at this time are great too!
Last question, go to Ritual spot?
My go-to ritual spot has to be Hero’s Certified Burgers, the burgers are so juicy and it’s so close by!
Sophie Schneider, returning as a co-op next term:
What did you like most about your term? (Sophie previously was a co-op in Fall 2018)
In my co-op term, we were building a lot of features and scaling for a big launch. This induced an agile environment where I got to personally ship a lot of code and really contribute to the approaches to designing and solving problems. The ownership was unlike any that I have had before, and I got to really impact a product that was helping an immense amount of people. Working on things like translations, accessibility, and cross-browser compatibility alongside new features helped me learn a lot about writing quality code that I can be proud of.
What made you decide to come back?
At the end of December, I got to see the roadmap for the rest of the year, and all the things that were happening after I left. Besides the obvious FOMO, contributing to a product you really care about and seeing it grow is super rewarding, which comes along with the ownership. I knew if I came back, I could hop back into working and building cool things right away. League is at my favourite stage of startup life, where things are happening so fast that it presents you with so many opportunities as a developer, even as an intern!
What are you looking forward to the most in your upcoming term?
I’m eager to work on some specific projects including the design system and some feature redesigns. Another amazing part about League is your ability to explore other disciplines so even though I’m a developer, I like design too and I’m able to do some work in it! Helping build something like a design system really piqued my interest, and I can’t wait to get started.
Thanks, folks! And for what it’s worth, my personal go-to Ritual spot is Sunset Grill by the CBC building, all day breakfast is the best.
“So… how are you liking League?”
If I were to sum up my experience at League in one word, I would pick “rewarding”. It’s rare to find a place in which you can grow so much professionally and still have so much fun along the way.
It could be said that one of the main appeals of co-op programs is that they allow one to gain work experience in a temporary setting that can lead to one discovering preferences or details that they never knew they had. While this is undoubtedly true at League, I found that my co-op term here not only gave me this “flavour sample” of what working as a developer is like but it also gave me the opportunity to live the life of a full-time employee for four months.
At a glance, this might sound more or less like the same thing, but the subtle difference lies in that I didn’t just get a sample of what writing code at a company is like, I got a taste of the what someone fresh out of school starting their full-time job would experience.
In my time at League, I grew day by day, taking on more ownership and directing how my days would be shaped.
I asked how insurance beneficiary forms work and also how the TTC can have so many power outages in a single week.
I learned how Redux Sagas work and also that Soup Nutsy is the superior soup based lunch compared to Zoup.
I grew both as a developer and as a person and got to do it alongside great people.
And that to me, encapsulates the co-op experience at League as a whole.
Look out for League in your school’s job postings next term, or check out any of the dozens of open roles today!
