THILINA RATNAYAKE - DJ & SYSTEMS ENGINEER

How did you decide on this passion/career and when was this decision made?

Honestly, it was a plan that was hastily put together for a Planning 10 assignment a few hours before it was due, that I ended up following through on. Thankfully, it turned out that I ended up enjoying the work during my post-secondary education, and within my career - I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to try my hand at many different roles.

What is a normal day like at work? (specific roles, interesting facts)

I’ve worked in 3 different roles in tech - as a Customer Support Engineer, a Systems Engineer and currently, as an Engineering Project Manager. As a Support Engineer, my day would consist of answering questions from customers regarding our networking product via the phone or on tickets (emails). When I wasn’t on phone-calls or tickets, I would be on video teleconferences with customers helping them with their deployments OR later on in my career - helping & training other support agents as a team lead. It was interesting because this role really taught and honed my skills of learning how to communicate effectively and learn about the things that are not necessarily said.

As a Systems Engineer, we maintain multiple systems to include engineering features, handling operations as well as support and incident management. My days could be varied all the way from spending time designing a feature with fellow engineers, being head-down in the code or tweaking infrastructure and on some days - leading a team in tackling a service disruption or an outage.

Currently as an Engineering Project Manager, I get to lead another engineer in assisting with solving organization-wide problems - which currently involves the migration of internal teams off one of our platforms onto something else. The cool part is I get to use all my skills and previous training to tailor the whole audience and handle everything from metrics, solutions research, customer engagement in addition to the whole project management piece. My day can involve everything from interviewing customers, building tooling, developing timelines and even creating graphical branding assets.

(I’ve also written a bit about this before: https://commons.bcit.ca/news/2019/09/thilina-ratnayake-computing-grad/

As well as what an engineering team is like here:

https://medium.com/@tratnayake/you-got-this-team-bcc89183c640)

What do you like the most about your job/what do you look most forward to in your job?

I love that my job is flexible, both in the hours that I work as well as the work that I get to do. It doesn’t get boring as I’m fortunate to work at an organization that lets me try different roles every few years. I also enjoy how collaborative my organization is - as we never truly work alone, and are only truly successful the more we teach, learn and support each-other. There’s no room for egos, but plenty of room for learning.

What are the benefits and perks of this job?

(In pre/post COVID times) A really swanky office down-town which offers free lunch 3 days a week with a snack-wall and drink fridge. The ability to travel for work to other offices as well as to conferences and workshops for professional development. A sick MacBook Pro and a corporate phone plan :P

What advice do you have for high schoolers?

Work hard on practicing and growing your soft skills (especially around working with others) and don’t just focus on the STEM subjects both in high-school or college. I hated my Critical Reading and Writing class in college, but I used it every day in responding to customers when I was in Support (and still everyday when writing e-mails that matter). I thought that my Philosophy class was a waste of time, but I fall back on it often to help understand how to communicate my actions and decisions to other stakeholders. I spent my high-school years in a youth organization helping throw events and I fall back on that experience heavily these days in helping manage a project. Everything that makes you a better communicator, writer, speaker and team-mate will help you shine amongst your peers, because the truth is - it’s easy to teach / train up the engineering skills, culture-fit and the willingness to learn is not. (However, re: STEM - if you are going into Comp Sci, take Calculus if you can (I didn’t, and kind of regret it), and if not - pay attention in the classes that teach you about Logarithmic functions and graphing, it will definitely come in handy).