So, after almost five years in my current company, in two weeks I’ll start in a new place.
I created this site a while ago with the idea of having a landing page, so I tested different templates and frameworks to set up a simple site where I could put my basic info, and after a lot of iterations, tests and overthinking (and overengineering), I ended up with this site, built with Hugo, just because I thought it would be nice to have a site that would allow me eventually add some blog posts in case I’d have something to say.
Well, I haven’t had too much to say so far, but now I do. So, I’m starting in a new job in two weeks and is a huge deal for me. I’ve been living in Spain for 15 years now, and my first job started as the IT support guy in a family business in a small town in Catalonia. After some years, I started thinking that I should do something different because I was becoming really unhappy with my job. I felt immensely lucky when the chance to pursue the dream of my childhood: being a scientist. I got offered a position in a research lab in computer science (in the multi-agents field) and I couldn’t get any more excited. Sadly after a couple of years (even less) I lived a constant disappointment about bad practices and living completely on my own with close to no support from my thesis supervisor, who was more concerned to have his name in the research papers than actually contributing, among other things. Spent a fair amount of time there and slowly moving away from computer engineering, working more and more in paperwork.
Finally, I decided to look once more to do software engineering and started doing freelance work. It wasn’t great because most people think that soft engineering is something easy and cheap to develop, which is true if you do it in a cheap unreliable way. But the thing is I spent most time bargaining budgets than actually working. It was a period where I was trying to catch up with tech (missed so many frameworks, tools even languages) at the same time I was paying the bills, luckily for me, my wife was there for supporting the family and me.
So I started becoming a fairly good mobile developer, between hobby projects and actually paid ones. And this is when everything changed. A recruiting company, famous for part-time jobs offers called me, but for a full-time position in a company in Barcelona. And after a month I started as a mobile developer.
We worked on many projects, failed and succeeded and what’s even cooler, I started looking and learning at the backend services too which was something that I basically considered witchcraft, since I thought it was way too complex for me to understand; have you heard about the impostor syndrome? Well, I’m a bad case of it. The thing is that always thought I wasn’t smart enough for anything: I wasn’t smart enough for engineering (I first wend for advertising as my first choice in the university), wasn’t smart enough to build a cool product, wasn’t smart enough to build a scalable system… In this company I realized that I may have been wrong, and after two years there, I ended up being Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager a year after that.
So this is why is a big deal today for me, moving to a new company as an Engineering Manager. Because it is my chance to prove myself that I’m not as dumb as I thought and I can perform great, I can contribute even in a new place, with new people, new challenges, new environment, new tech. I’m excited but also very scared, but that’s a good thing, is part of the thrill.