Introduction
I’ve been working in the Netherlands for six months now. It is my first experience working in Europe and although I’ve set minimal expectations mainly due to the fact that I was working for a great company, considering that I was not leaving for any of today’s dream companies I just expected a similar experience. In this post and want to share my experience and point some misbeliefs.
The mutt complex
By “mutt complex” I understand the inferiority in which the Brazilian put yourself voluntarily in the face of the world. This in all sectors and especially in football. — Nelson Rodrigues
My experience here is too limited yet, I just know some companies and most of them in the Netherlands even so, I want to say that about software development and in this definition I include methods, process, languages and skilled people Brazil is surely not behind some developed countries.
This this comparison is based on medium-sized companies in both countries and most of them based on big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam.
Question and my answers
I will try to give my answers to common questions that I raised before moving and that I see as common questions for more people.
So you mean that in Europe with their better education system they also struggle to find good developers?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: I’m not comparing the number of colleges, quality of them or how hard can be in Brazil to have a proper education, but if you look directly to open vacancies and hiring process it is the same as in Brasil, what I mean? Usually, if you want to hire good software engineers you need to convince them to leave their current companies and offer better conditions.
Ok, but once you moved to a European company you are rich and you are waiting for your Tesla.
Short answer: Definitely no.
Long answer: I still don’t know any normal software engineer here that became rich coding. The salary is pretty good, but at least compared with cities like Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo it is not that different. It is not 2x more money here than in Brasil.
Ok, but at least they are far in front of Brazil when the subject is technology, development process and quality
Short answer: No.
Long answer: They are learning the same trending programming languages, following the same process and doing the same mistakes and etc. For example what I do here is basically design, build and maintain APIs deployed to the cloud(GCloud) using containers, rest and so on.
Ahh, but in Europe, companies give you the best hardware and everything you need. Money is not a problem
Short answer: again, no.
Long answer: Similarly to Brazil, there are companies which give you the dream setup and there are companies offering standard environments.
So, you mean working in Brazil IT companies is almost the same as in European companies?
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Technically it is, there is the huge difference of culture and behaviors that for sure influence and modify the process but I can say the struggles and challenges are pretty much the same.
Ok, so if it is similar why you decided to leave your country?
Short answer: It is about personal experience and soft skills.
Long answer: I moved to live the experience and take conclusions with my own experience. My reasons are much more related to personal development and soft skills than to technical ones. Today I work in a real international environment and I learn every day is to work with different ways of thinking and learning different approaches.
Hum.. I’m not sure yet. can you give examples of problems?
The list could be really huge but some simple examples are:
- We are down, there is something wrong in production.
- Our rollback takes too long
- We are not testing the most important scenarios
Conclusion
I definitely believe the experience to live and work abroad is incredible, I do recommend it to my friends but on the other hand, we must stop this mutt complex. There are great engineers, companies, and projects in Brazil and they are not in any way worse than here.
Ok, got it. Now, could you share some of these cool companies that you believe exist in Brazil?
In the last years I worked for VTEX but I heard good stories from a lot of others, you can send me PM to ask about them.
