The only reason why I wrote that email is because my mentor, he told me to. I wasn't keen to write that email. I didn't want to. I was so frustrated that I was like, I would never get a job in tech. I'll try to do something else, because, honestly, I'm sick of it. And he insisted with me. No. Write the email. Write the email. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Baldeboz. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back, everybody, to the Pibytes podcast. Here are your host, Bob Eldebos, and I'm with Julian Sequeira. How's it going, man? Good. Finally back on Monday, starting a new week that's much better to record today. It feels good. I've got the energy ready to go. We're super stoked because this week, we have a very special guest with us, Gabriel Simone. Welcome, Gabriel, to the show. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me here. No, our pleasure. We are stoked. Stoked to introduce you. So, look, let's get started. Let's jump straight in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Okay. So this is a long story. I have a very diverse background. I'm actually a brazilian guy living in Scotland now, and I have a bachelor in geography. And I was a teacher for a few years. Then I moved into the translation field. So I happened to work such a long time as a translator. I was even a project manager for technical translations. By the way, that's the first time I came across some technicality in my work. And then my wife and I, we decided to leave and to leave Brazil and to go somewhere else. And here I am now in Scotland and working as a QA engineer or Ingenico. Not sure if you know this company. It's been acquired by Worldline recently. It's one of the giants from the payments industry. Cool. No, no, that's a great story. I love the progression. And of all the places to end up, Scotland. That's very cool. That's unusual. I can hear it in your accent as well, which is great. Now, look, for everyone who's listening, there's a special reason we've asked Gabriel to come and share his story on the show today. And it comes down to the story that we're constantly trying to tell which is that programming is accessible to anyone, you know, and it's something that we all have to overcome. The imposter syndrome. And Gabriel's done just that. So congratulations is due, Gabriel, for your landing, your QA job. That is spectacular and something we were so excited about to hear. Why don't you, I guess, the career change into that. That is the story. That is the most amazing thing I've heard all year. Well, or long. Weak, I should say. So why don't you tell us about the career change? Why did you change into the QA engineer role? So, that was a. I cannot embellish much the story. I changed my career because I needed to. When I moved to Scotland with my wife, we were actually, before we spent some time in Portugal, and it was terrible there. We've been through a lot of hard stuff in Portugal, but a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those crazy coincidences in life, offered me this job. I was working in kitchens in Portugal as a chef or KP or whatever, and he needed someone else to help him, and it was really hard for him to hire in Scotland, and there's not too many people here, I think. And then I came. The situation was so hard for us in Portugal that in two weeks, I was living here already. Yeah, there was a bold move, and I spent a few months working as a chef, and I still have some mementos from that time. My back still hurts, and my hand gets numb from time to time. I got this. Yeah, I collected these health issues during the time I worked there, which wasn't too much. But in the last months I was working there, I was already tired, and I was used having a life before when I was back in Brazil with office jobs, and so I was a project manager. I had some background, and I wanted to get back to it at some point. And then I started exploring what were my options, because one thing that was really clear from right from the beginning is that being a translator from Portuguese to English or the other way around, it wouldn't be very helpful for me in here. So I started looking at possible options, what I could do, and I was talking to a friend, and I said I was interested in learning a programming language just for the fun or just to explore and see if that was something cool, if there was something that I wanted to do. And he told me he's to blame in this case. He said, why don't you try python? It's a very beginner friendly language, and it's C based, so you get to. If you really get into it. You get some good knowledge about computer science itself. And I said, okay, I'll try that. And I started looking at some resources and some free learning sources around the Internet and YouTube, and eventually I came across spy bytes. Nice. Yeah. Grateful for that. Thank you. Oh, I appreciate it because it helped me a lot. Bob, by the way, was a guy who I've been speaking for over a year now. We're always talking about Python and career and this kind of stuff, and so by the end of 2019 in December, I came across an opportunity for a support role in this company in Genco. And it was very surprising to me in the beginning because it was a great company, like, a big company, and it wasn't in Edinburgh. Since I moved to Scotland, I've become a countryside boy. I'm living, actually in the outskirts of Edinburgh, just across the bridge, if anyone knows what I'm talking about. So I happened to live in a small town, and I had to go every day to Edinburgh when I worked at the pub, and I found this company that was, like, a good job, at least a good entry point for me, and it was closer to home. And then I applied. I came here for an interview, and they liked me, and I started here. And then COVID. Oh, yeah. So that's basically why I changed careers, because I needed to. I actually fell in love with Python and the things I could do with Python. Awesome. So, yeah, wow, that's a long journey and a lot of courage there. So you landed a support role, going from chef and a double migration, right? Brazil. Portugal. Portugal. Scotland. Then you're in the support role, and ultimately you get into software test engineering. By the way, the article you wrote is how I made my move into software test engineering. We'll link that below. So, yeah, zooming in on that last transition from support to test engineering, that's a great leap. So what helped you make that transition? Because you said you already dabbled in Python. Actually fell in love with Python, as we all do, inevitably. I never look back. But then still, you know, to get to a software test engineering role, that. That's a major leap. So tell us a bit. And some of that is in the article and. Yeah, but tell us a bit about that final stretch. Important stretch. Yeah. So that was a bit better because I was in a more comfortable position due to COVID. I was working from home all the time, so I had time to spend researching and studying and learning whatever I could learn. So that's what I've done since January 2020. So over a year, a year and a half. Now, during this time I didn't have much expectations. When I started working as a help desk agent, I was actually a IT support agent, but of course I was the frontline guy, one of them for the final users, the end users, actually. So we had a lot of this customer service component in our job. So it was not only technical, it was actually much more customer service than a technical job, and which was great, by the way, because I could get used to this cottage accent a bit more nice. And it wasn't, it wasn't really a job that I wanted to do. It wasn't my first option, I should say that, but I'm very grateful because I ended up knowing, or getting to know our products from within. Not only from within, but getting the feedback from the end user, which I don't have here as a QA engineer, because of course I don't have this point of contact with the end user. There's a lot of other support levels before some things get to us. But there I could see how exactly the end user was interacting with our product. That was really important and it gave me as well some very good troubleshooting skills that are very useful today. So what I've done over this time, I was working a lot because of COVID and I was really busy all the time and my wife was pregnant for most of the last year. I am a father of a ten month old baby girl, Eloise. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. So there was a lot of stuff going on at the same time, as you can see. I hope my life gets a little bit boring from now on, because honestly, I can't take it anymore. Fingers crossed. Yeah. And so one day what happened is when I started learning Python and I was obviously for, I went for the hype for web development and I started learning some things in HTML, CSS, which I can't say I learned much, and also JavaScript. So I was there for, there's more availability for web development than for anything else to learn on the Internet. So I was there, but for some time I started wondering if I really wanted to be a web developer because actually there was some stuff that I loved about it. So I really like the back end side of things. Actually, my first contact was with your course on Flask. Oh, thank you. Don't blame me. And. But that was really great. But I didn't know if that was exactly what I wanted to do. And I started thinking of what, what exactly I wanted to do, what exactly I could do, since I don't have a science degree, which makes a difference because it's a lot of knowledge that you build up over time on a CSS Cs course. And so I wasn't pretty sure about if I really could or wanted to be a web developer. So I started looking back at my career and the things I've done and trying to pinpoint skills or anything that I had built over time that I could make use of right now in this career change. And I remember when I was back in Brazil, I used to work for another french company, actually a translation company in French, and I was their sole consultant on site in Brazil. And I did everything by myself there. That was my side job. So I was the one who did the translations with a team, but on site to do the validation tests, to really test the questionnaires and the material we were translating. I was the only person in charge of it in Brazil. So I started looking at this experience I've had and I said, hey, there's something there. Testing and quality assurance validation test. I've heard this before within software. Let me take a look at that. So I went researching on software testing and quality software and I found this niche that it just sparked. And I said, okay, this is something I can do because I really like, I really enjoy finding defects. My dev team must hate me, but I really like to find problems, to find issues and be this less filter before the product is released. So I started looking at this. So I applied to several different places. They wanted someone who had some experience in the field, which I didn't, and I started to feel sad and like, what the hell? What can I do? I don't know what I would do. I don't want to be in a support role forever, which is fine, it just wasn't for me, exactly. I want to do some other stuff, but I couldn't see a chance, I couldn't see any room to do that. So one day I remembered about, by the way, a shout out to him, Matt Kennedy, who's my manager here. I remembered his name. I remember seeing his name as the software, software development manager here in his company. And I just wrote him an email saying I was interested in moving to tech to development, whatever opportunity he had there. And the quality assurance department is the strongest here in the UK. So he told me that and I was like, oh, Jesus, I don't know what to do. Oh my God, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, I was really frustrated and overwhelmed and, well, but then I, at the same time. That's when I thought about this quality work I have done in the past and how it could help me. And so I wrote him another email and asked for, for the outlook. What was his outlook on testing opportunities here? And he said, oh, your timing is great because I'm just getting approval to two new testing roles here right now. I expect to receive the reply next week. Oh my God. So a few weeks later, we set up a, a first interview. I've had an interview with him and I had another interview with him and the person who is my QA lead currently. And I took a technical test and I was offered the role and here I am since 17 May. Amazing. Awesome. I really see three important lessons in this story. So first of all, so first of all, don't obsess over a certain subdomain because web development, that's of course, awesome, but that's also very difficult to get into if you don't have prior experience. But you kind of went back to your previous experience. And if I may quote, I love that in your article. I'm not 18, I'm not 18 years old anymore. I'm a 34 years old man with some good and diverse work experience and maybe this could be an attribute I should go all in. So you went back to your previous experience and leveraged that and then came down to the testing niche you had experience in and which made it more accessible. Second of all, well, that was actually the second point. Like, you niched it down and you wrote that email. A lot of people are not that proactive in reaching out. And turns out at that point, the universe aligned and he had actually an opportunity for you. So, yeah, there were some great career lessons in this story. And you elaborated on the article. Yeah, there's another point here that I'd like to raise some good advice that actually my experience was great and I think it's worth for everyone looking to get into a new feud. Two things actually. First of all, do not ignore your previous work. Although we're learning, we're starting, when we start to learn something new, it seems like we're dumb. We don't know anything. But yeah, that might be true. I didn't know anything about web development. I still don't know a lot because I don't work with it. But for quite some time, I forgot that I had some experience, that I had other skills and don't do that. Always try to leverage your previous skills because it's very possible that you may find something that you could actually take advantage for and use it as a, let's say, a business card when you're trying to get into a new field. And another thing is to look for help from experienced people. The only reason why I wrote that email is because my mentor, which is David Daly, by the way, great guy. He told me to, I wasn't keen to write that email. Didn't want to. I was so frustrated that I was like, I would never get a job in tech. I'll try to do something else because honestly, I'm sick of it. And he insisted with me, no, write the email. Write the email. He didn't reply to you, but that's probably because he's a country manager and he's a very busy guy. Just remind him. Ask him again. And so I've done and I got the job. So, yes. That's awesome. Yeah, write the email. So that's actually a good. A good lesson for people. And I'll break down a couple of things. I've been making notes. I love it. So, first of all, that email, if I work backwards from what you've said, the email is so important. It's such a simple thing to do, but it's one of the hardest things people will ever do. It will ever be faced with. No one wants to bother someone else. No one wants to feel like they're just that little yapping dog at the bottom, nipping at the heels of, like, the big, the big dog, you know? And it's very easy to fall into that trap and that situation, especially if you're in a role that is perceived as frontline or as the entry level role or something. And you just. Naturally, in this spot of imposter syndrome, it's like the culture, everything, the title, it's all built around making you feel like you're just the small fry and you have no business talking to the big dogs, right, or the people you perceive as the big dogs. So sending that email takes absolute guts. And I think that's amazing that you did that. There's always. There's also the fact that I'm an immigrant. That is something that helps to undermine the trust in yourself. At least it happened to me. Why is that? Is that because you felt like, you know, you knew here you should be laying the foundation, working your way up? Is that. Is that what you mean? Yeah, it's because I didn't know. I wasn't able. It took me a long time, actually, to gauge how important my background would be here, how valuable my education and the previous work I've done would be. In here. I didn't know because it could be the case. At least that was something that crossed my mind all the time, that they just thought that I was an immigrant guy from a poor country, and so I don't have the same level of knowledge or development personally seen. Wow. And. And did you find. Now, I'm digging here a little bit, but did you find that that was it. Was that an impression you were given, or was it an impression you were just telling yourself? No, I wasn't giving that impression at all. I. It's something that I do to myself, so it's a bit of a. I was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Imposter syndrome. Right. Yeah. Because later, when I. Of course, when. When I was offered this new role, I. That was an answer to all of these questions that I made myself. So, yes, my experience is valuable. I have some value, at least to this business, and not just to the business, to everyone listening right now, who's in the same boat. Right. I mean, your story is actually. It's quite inspirational to me, hearing all of this, every single bit of hardship that you faced coming into here and the stress, the fear. I mean, you did all this, as well with a pregnant wife during a pandemic. I was there, as well. You know, we've got. I've got a seven month old, so I know that. Thank you. And to you, as well. But, you know, you. Every time you pushed and you pushed through the fear and there was a growth moment, and it led to this confidence, it led to you telling yourself, oh, actually, I am worth this. This was worthwhile. I'm not actually just an immigrant. You know, I am valuable. I'm providing value to this team. And something you said before with your. The job that you were doing, the customer service job, you are pulling in all this valuable insight of what it's like to be a customer, of what the pain they actually have is. And that is something the majority of people in these back end roles, these senior support roles, whatever you want to call it, they don't get that exposure. And I'm in that same boat. When you happen to be to have that experience of being on the ground, facing the fire day in, day out, then when you get into these other back end admin support roles, qa, whatever it is, they look at you like, oh, my gosh, look at this wealth of experience that Gabriel brings to the table. Wow. We would never have had that insight if he hadn't have had that job facing the customer. So I think that's a good and excellent example for anyone listening to this who is in a role where they feel like I'm just, and I say just in, you know, air quotes here, just entry level, I'm just customer facing. Those are such valuable roles because they give you these incredible insights into what it's like using the product of the company. So I think that was a really, really great point that you made. Yeah. That's awesome. Sorry. That's awesome. And on a similar note, the perception, a lot of people we speak with, that you have to have a CS degree, otherwise it's not going to happen. Right. And you stayed here. No one has ever underestimated me due to not having a CS degree or something like that. But in lieu, they appreciate the effort and I've done. I'm still doing to learn. So, yeah, often we tell these stories to ourselves. Well, I don't have the education. It's not going to happen for me. But all that other experience that came in handy, and now the work ethic and the mindset you bring to the job. Right. Cs degree is not even on the table. It's not even needed. It's just. So I think that's another important thing for people listening that really limit their self belief just due to a constraint that might not even be on the table. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's totally true. I think more than a computer science degree, what made the difference for myself here was this knowledge I brought from the front line. All this. This is really, really. Gillian said the perfect word. It's valuable information because we know how it gets, how it works to the end user. Yeah. And I feel like it's. It's any role as well. I mean, I still draw on my experience from when I was 15 at my first job as a, you know, working retail in an electronics store. Yeah. I mean, I built up a lot of tech skills, but the skills of dealing with customers who are unhappy with their, say, a tv they just brought home, that's not working. I mean, these are great experiences that we should all draw on because it's invaluable. It's no different to working in a large corporation and having a customer who, say, accounts been locked out, that through a fault that's not theirs, it's the same mentality. So I think it's all valuable, and that's a really great lesson. Well, that was fantastic, Gabriel, I really enjoyed the chat, but before we wrap it up, we've got another thing to ask you. One more thing. We're big on reading and books, so we have to ask you, what are you currently reading? So what I'm reading right now, unfortunately, I'm not having time to read anything non technical, and I'm also taking advantage of this momentum of getting this new job. And I'm reading introducing software testing. I do not remember the name of the author exactly, but it's one of the main books for the IStqB exam. So it's one of the basic readings software testing. And also I'm reading that the C programming language to understand, because that's what we use here in the job. So I need to understand a bit better about C programming language. That's okay. We won't judge you. We won't hold that against you. Well, Python is written in c. Yeah, no, that's. That's brilliant. Thank you for that. Yeah, we'll put links for those in the. In the comments below. So look, as. As we wrap it up, where can people find more about you? And we'll obviously link to the article that we've referenced that you wrote about all of this. But, yeah, where can people find you? So you can find my website. On my website, you have the links for my Twitter account and to LinkedIn if you want to connect there, and also to my GitHub profile. So my website is g Simoins Gsimoes dot m e. And you're on the pibytes slack. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a bit. I've been a bit absent there, but from there. Awesome. That's right. We'll forgive you. I don't think. I don't think you can get on this podcast if you're not in our pie bytes, like, no, I'm joking. And the requirements. Yeah. And the requirements file. Yeah. Well, look, Gabriel, thank you so much for your time, and it was just such an inspiring story. We really, really appreciate you sharing it with us so candidly as well. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. You hope to come back eventually if I have something new. Yeah. For the next role. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. Thanks, Gabriel. This was really insightful. Thanks for being on the show. Brilliant. And everyone, thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed Gabriel's story. It really was an inspiration for Bob and I when we heard it. We thought, we have to. We have to share this story. Hopefully, it inspires you to reach out, do something, build that courage, and take that next step to really get you to your python goals and wherever you need to be. So thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Take care and remember, if you are hesitant, just send that email. See you next week. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pibit es friends and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community, that's Pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.