Key takeaways
- A company offsite hits differently when the whole team, distributed across time zones and Slack channels, lands in the same room
- The theme of Ignite wasn't just branding. For returning co-ops, it was personal
- Keynotes on AI, mastery, and the future of tech are more energizing than unsettling when you're surrounded by people taking them seriously
- The moments you don't plan for, a choir at a lunch service, a disposable camera, a personality test, are often what you carry home
- Being a student developer at a company that invests in its people isn't something to take for granted
Most days, being a software developer co-op looks like this: open Slack, check the ticket queue, jump on a standup, disappear into a pull request for a few hours. It's good work. But for a lot of it, the people you're building with are just names in a thread and faces in a small rectangle on your screen.
I'm Georgia Guirguis, a third-year software engineering student at UVic, and this is my second co-op term at Shift. My team is distributed, my collaboration is mostly asynchronous, and like a lot of people working in tech right now, most of my relationships with coworkers live primarily online.
There's a broader conversation happening about what that does to company culture. Remote work gives people flexibility and autonomy, and most people don't want to give that up. But something gets lost too. The casual hallway conversation, the lunch that turns into a real idea, the sense that you actually know the people you're working with. A lot of companies are still figuring out how to get that back, or whether they even want to try.
Shift Connect is our company’s answer to that question. Once a year, the whole company, distributed teams, different time zones, almost everyone, gets on a plane, boat, or in a car to Victoria, BC. And for three days, the screen goes away.
What Shift Connect actually is
It's not a conference. It's not a corporate retreat with trust falls and motivational posters. The closest comparison I have is summer camp, and I mean that in the best way. Three days in Victoria: keynotes from founders and industry thinkers, a people and culture workshop where you learn more about yourself than you expected, volunteering in the community, beach games, a formal awards dinner, late nights at a pinball bar, and enough shared meals to actually get to know the people sitting across from you. The itinerary is packed, the energy is high, and you go to bed tired every night in the best possible way.
For Kariman, a fellow software developer in test co-op at Shift, the cross-company dimension was the part she didn't fully anticipate.
I expected a lot of team bonding with the people I work with every day," she said. "I didn't realize how much interaction there would be across the entire company. Getting to meet people from different teams I normally wouldn't work with, that was something that pleasantly surprised me.
As a software developer co-op showing up for the second time, I knew what the broad shape of it would look like. What I didn't expect was how personal the theme would feel once I was actually in it. This year's theme was Ignite. When I first heard it, I thought: create a spark, get things moving. But coming back after a year away, it meant something more specific. It meant relighting connections. There were people I hadn't seen since my first term, and Shift Connect was the chance to find that warmth again, to pick up where things left off and remember why I wanted to come back.
For Kariman, Ignite was about stepping outside her comfort zone. She even brought a disposable camera to capture candid moments throughout the week.
It reminded me to slow down and appreciate the experience," she said. "Creating memories in a way that's a little different from just taking pictures on my phone.
Small things. Big impact. That's kind of what the whole week was.
The keynotes and what they actually stirred up
The sessions at Shift Connect weren't the kind you sit through. They were the kind you think about on the shuttle back to the hotel.
Michael Sacca opened with "The year the giants came," a look at the scale of change happening in the industry right now. Then Marco Pimentel asked a harder question: is AI a catalyst for climate solutions, or a climate crisis? Steve Davis rounded out the keynote speakers on Thursday before Dave Thompson closed with the one that probably landed hardest for both Kariman and me: "20 years of mastery, obsolete in 1."
As student developers early in our careers, you might expect that title to feel like a gut punch. It didn't. It felt like a permission slip to stay curious. The point wasn't that what you know doesn't matter. It was that the pace of change rewards people who keep learning, who stay engaged, who don't assume they've arrived.
For Kariman, the Marco Pimentel keynote was the one she's still sitting with.
I'm leaving Shift Connect even more excited about the future of AI and the opportunities it creates," she said. "At the same time, Marco's keynote reminded me that innovation also comes with responsibility. It made me think about how we can use AI in ways that are both impactful and mindful of its broader effects. As someone early in my career, I want to keep learning not just how to build with AI, but how to use it thoughtfully.
That framing stuck with me too. We're not watching AI happen from the outside. We're inside a company that's actively building with it, thinking seriously about it, and asking the right questions. That's a different experience than reading about it. Being a remote developer or a software developer co-op at a company like Shift right now means you're in the room where these conversations are happening, not waiting for a summary.
What a company offsite says about a company
Here's the thing about Shift Connect that I keep coming back to: most companies aren't doing this. Especially not for co-ops.
In a world of distributed teams, remote dev jobs, and accelerating change, the easiest thing to do is keep people behind screens and let the work speak for itself. Shift doesn't do that. They fly everyone to the same city, build three days of intentional programming, and make sure the newest people on the team are in the room for all of it. For me, that's not a small thing.
One of the sessions that reflected this most clearly was the Redbrick People and Culture workshop, where we took the Predictive Index and then spent time learning about ourselves and each other. I started seeing my results in how I actually behave, with my team, with my friends, with my family. An offsite that gives you a sharper lens on yourself isn't just team-building. It's something rarer. Kariman felt it too:
Spending time together outside the office showed me that sometimes all it takes is a simple activity or conversation to build genuine connections. It reinforced the sense of community I already felt at Shift and made those connections even stronger.
The stuff that doesn't make it onto the agenda
Some of the best parts of Shift Connect don't have a time slot.
Volunteering at Our Place Society was one of them. We happened to be there on a day a local choir was performing, which only happens once a month. There was dancing. There was singing along. There were people from a tech company sharing a meal with a part of the community we don't usually get to spend time with. It wasn't on the agenda as a culture moment. It was just a good thing to do, and it felt like one.
It had been a long time since I'd volunteered like that," Kariman said. "Being able to give back to the community as part of Shift Connect made the experience even more special. It was a nice reminder of how small acts of kindness can make someone's day.
Then there was everything else: beach games at Willows Beach, pizza and pinball at Pinhalla, the Shifties awards dinner at the Inn at Laurel Point. What made those moments land wasn't the activities themselves. It was that everyone was actually present. Nobody was performing. Everyone was just there, laughing, being competitive, being a little silly, being human.
It was fun seeing everyone's competitive and silly side outside of work," Kariman said. "It made everyone feel a lot more approachable.
That's the part that's hard to manufacture and easy to undervalue. Good old-fashioned fun, with people you actually like, without worrying about how you come across.
Monday morning
The summer camp is over. The work starts back up again.
But something came back with me. A clearer picture of the people I'm working with. A better sense of what Shift is actually trying to build, and why it matters. A renewed feeling that being a student developer at a company serious about its people, at a moment when the industry is genuinely in motion, is worth paying attention to.
Kariman put it well:
If you've seen Inside Out, I'd definitely call it one of my little yellow core memories.
The work continues. But it's easier to care about it when you know who's doing it with you.
