10 Years Into My Career (& lessons learned so far)
2021 marks exactly 10 years that I “officially” started my career. It’s been a ride and I’d like to use this moment to reflect on my journey and some of my lessons learned so far. But first…
If you don’t know me or haven’t had the chance to read my self-intro somewhere else, I’m Tutti (@tuttiq online), and I’m originally from São Paulo, Brazil, where I majored in Computer Engineering and started my career as a software engineer. After a few years working in Brazil, I moved to London (UK) for about 2 years, working as a web developer, and after that, I moved to Tokyo (Japan), where I have been for the last 3 years.
I’ve worked as a software engineer and then an engineering manager for about 8 years (from 2011 to 2018), and then moved into program management for the last 2 years, where I became the group manager for Diversity & Inclusion and Learning & Development at Mercari. I know, it’s a bit of a jump, but I’ll explain the details and how it happened throughout this article.
Also, around 2018 I became a director of Women Who Code Tokyo, the local chapter of a global non-profit organization dedicated to supporting women in tech careers. This is a volunteer side-job that I’m still engaged in until today.
Context: before my first job
To give some context, I was born and raised in Brazil, state of São Paulo, in a mid-sized city 1-hour away from the capital. Both my parents have PhDs and pretty decent jobs, and we overall never struggled much with money. Around 2000 we bought our second computer at my house and somewhere between 2001 and 2003 we finally upgraded our dial-up internet connection to broadband.
At that time, I was 13 and a big fan of Japanese animation and manga (believe me, this is NOT why I’m in Japan now, you’ll see). When I was 14~15 years old, I created a blog about Japanese anime and manga, which quickly turned into a somewhat popular website as I added more content and learned how to customize the layouts and stuff. I wrote a more detailed story about this website here. Anyways, this is how I got into programming, so I decided to major in Computer Engineering in college.
Little did I know that majoring in Computer Engineering was a little bit more than making a static website with HTML and CSS (lol), but luckily I still enjoyed it. In fact, the programming subjects were my favorite ones. I was terrible at all the core engineering subjects like Calculus or Physics, but I excelled in things like Programming Languages Paradigms, I was even a teaching assistant for a short while.
But college is so much more than just going to class and studying for tests. Around my second year, I decided to step up and get involved with a bunch of extra-curricular activities. I found out about the Computer Engineering Student Union (a student-led council/organization to support student’s rights and experience on campus), so I formed a party and we were elected for the upcoming term. I also joined as secretary-general of the Engineering Sports League, where we organized sports teams and events for all engineering majors.
Don't be fooled by the smiles and drinks in our hands, there are obviously no photos of us having official meetings late at night, yelling at each other during stressful events, struggling to manage our budget and marketing strategy, etc...
After about 2 years in these organizations and a lot of lessons learned, we stepped down and handed it over to newer students for the following term. I then started looking for internships to fulfill my required credits.
PS: My curriculum at that time had a requirement of 20h/week of internship for 2 entire semesters. Yes, that’s right. About ~600h of mandatory internship in 1 year. I’m still pretty shocked when I hear people from the US or here in Japan talking about “Summer internships” that last only a few weeks or a couple of months…
Graduating & getting started
I got my first internship as a Java web developer at a local R&D institute where I helped develop a system to manage customer service workflows for a big electricity company in Brazil. My second internship was at Bosch, where I worked with web technologies, supporting and improving their internal tools (lots of SAP and SharePoint, but a bit of C# and Javascript as well). At that point, I was working 30h per week and mainly fixing bugs on the existing systems, but I did get the chance to participate in one project from scratch (it was a new feature for their internal e-commerce site).
During my second year of internship (it was optional, but I chose to do 2 full years of internships), I had to start my capstone project to get my degree. It was a solo project where we had to find a “real” client and then develop a full system on their request using a lot of what we learned throughout the whole major. It involved consulting, designing the solution, planning the whole project timeline, a test plan, plus implementing, deploying and validating the whole system in the end. Now that I look back, that was one of my most solid experiences as a software engineer (but at the time I was freaking out about how much work I had to do).
My capstone project: WebClinica, a doctor's office management system made for my mom and 3 other doctors. I still wanna write a separate article about this project.
When my internships were over, I got a bit worried about not having a fixed income anymore, so even if I hadn’t graduated yet, I got a full-time job as Ruby on Rails developer at a local startup. It was a little crazy because I was juggling my classes, the capstone project, and working (more than) full-time at the startup. I definitely learned a lot during that year, but it meant I had to postpone my graduation. Eventually, I decided to leave my job to focus on graduating, and so, after a total of 6.5 years, I finally got my degree (for reference, the original duration of my major was supposed to be 5 years).
I didn’t even have my diploma printed out yet when I got a new job as a mobile engineer at Samsung Brazil, mainly using Java to develop Android apps. Not long after I joined, my team was assigned to an international project and I had the chance to visit South Korea on a business trip. That was my first time visiting Asia and experiencing the multitude of emotions that was a 30-hour flight from São Paulo to Suwon (I don’t recommend it). I stayed in Korea for only one month, but it was an eye-opening moment of my life. The culture shock, the language barrier, the food and even the crazy work hours. I realized how much there was to see and experience outside of my bubble in Brazil and somehow it seemed within my reach. That’s when I decided I wanted to work abroad.
Samsung Digital City in Suwon, South Korea
From São Paulo to the world
I came back from Korea and just a few months later I started looking for opportunities to work outside Brazil. I even asked around for a permanent transfer inside Samsung, but it was not possible at that time. So, after several months and literally hundreds of rejections (believe me, I was almost giving up), I finally got an offer to join Quipper, an EdTech startup based in London (UK). The offer was to join them as a full-stack web developer using Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js at that time. I didn’t even think twice, I packed everything and moved to London at the end of 2015.
Although the moving process and obtaining the visa were stressful, moving to London was a life-changing experience. It was my first time in Europe, my first time living abroad and my first time using English as my main language. And because we also had a pretty decent work-life balance, I was able to travel a bit around Europe while I was there (and Brexit hadn’t happened yet lol).
We used to have a ping-pong match after every stand-up, but that space was frequently turned into our lunch table or conference room when needed too.
After about 1.5 years of great experiences and learnings at Quipper UK, I was starting to think about my next career step. One interesting fact about Quipper is that, despite having an HQ based in London at that time, they didn’t sell their product in the UK. Their main target markets were Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico (and they also had much larger offices in these countries than the HQ in London). Also, exactly in the year that I joined, Quipper had been acquired by a large Japanese corporation called Recruit, which also explained their large operations in Tokyo, Japan.
So, as expected, most of Quipper’s efforts were focused on these other countries, and the London office was not growing anymore, which meant that the opportunities I had there were a bit limited. So I spoke to the CTO at the time (Tomo-san) and asked about a possible transfer to their Tokyo office, so I could be closer to their main projects and have a larger spectrum of opportunities. To my surprise, it was well accepted and we decided to move forward with the transfer. In October of 2017, I moved from London to Tokyo, Japan.
Moving to Tokyo was definitely a much less painful process (especially since I had already been through it once), but an even bigger life-changing experience than when I moved to London. There’s so much that I can talk about this move, but for the purpose of this article I’ll keep it brief and focus on my work experiences here.
Visiting and talking to our customers directly and working with a distributed global team was a great experience I was able to have at Quipper
In my first year at Quipper Tokyo, I realized the language was going to be a bigger barrier than anyone had anticipated. Even if a lot of the engineers were able to communicate in pretty decent English, most of the PMs, sales, and corporate side could only speak and understand Japanese, which made my opportunities fairly limited. Because I could not speak Japanese, I was assigned to work on the global product, in collaboration with the team in Manila (Philippines). That worked out well, and I also got to visit Manila quite a few times to meet the team and our customers (the schools using our product), which was a lot of fun.
At this point, I had already 7~8 years of experience with software development. More than half of it was with the same tech stack (Ruby on Rails), so I naturally transitioned into a kind of tech lead role, as I was usually the most senior developer on my projects. At the same time, there were a few discussions going on at Quipper about how to improve the retention rate and hiring process of engineers, which I decided to get involved in. Eventually, I got really into these people-related issues, so I told my manager I would like to be an engineering manager. To my surprise, it happened shortly after when a position came up in a company reorganization.
Stepping into leadership
Besides my new role as an engineering manager at Quipper, around the same time in 2018, my friend and Quipper colleague Joy Paas introduced me to the Women Who Code organization. She was a director of the Manila chapter in the Philippines and occasionally visited Tokyo. During one of her visits, she invited me to one of the events held by the WWCode Tokyo chapter. I was instantly captivated by the organization and its mission: inspiring women to excel in technology careers.
Almost on a nostalgic feeling about my experience leading the student organizations, I quickly decided to get involved with Women Who Code. I talked to the Tokyo directors at the time, Lena and Himi, and they accepted me as a volunteer and lead for some of their study sessions. Shortly after, I was invited to become a director and help manage the community as well.
I got some great experiences and opportunities as a Women Who Code director
I’ve explained in more detail what the team and I have been doing on the Tokyo chapter of WWCode in this article, but in summary, we organize events and activities for a community of local women in tech, focused on career growth, building skills, networking and more. As a director, it’s also part of my role to manage the community, recruit and onboard new volunteers, make partnerships with companies, and manage our finances and operations in general. After joining WWCode I also started to engage in public speaking in a more professional setting. I held talks, participated in panels and applied to speak at many international conferences.
Being a part of dev communities, organizing events, and speaking at conferences not only taught me a lot of important skills but also increased my visibility and helped me make a ton of useful connections. That’s when I got to know a lot more about the tech startup scene in Japan and eventually, I switched jobs to join Mercari (the largest C2C marketplace app in Japan), as part of their Engineering Office team.
As part of the Engineering Office team at Mercari, I worked on managing programs for the engineering division. This included things such as improving onboarding and training for engineers. Eventually, we identified a similar need as I had encountered at Quipper previously: to better define the engineering culture and create a career development framework for engineers. That’s when I led a big project called the Engineering Career Ladder, in which we revamped the level definitions and evaluation process for engineers (more about this project in this article).
With my background as a tech lead and engineering manager, I was soon promoted to manage a team of technical program managers at Mercari. I was still fairly new to program management and leading the team was a big challenge for me, but we were learning and growing together as a team. At the same time, I was still involved with Women Who Code and proactively organizing the community on the side. With a lot of support from my manager at the time, I was able to start several partnerships and collaborations between Women Who Code and Mercari, contributing to Mercari’s diversity & inclusion efforts.
People & culture >> tech (at least for now)
After a few successful projects as part of the Engineering Office and plenty of contributions to the diversity & inclusion initiatives, I was invited to lead the creation of a brand new Learning & Development team on the corporate side. The team would be in charge of creating a leadership development program for managers, improving onboarding, and scaling other people programs like D&I to the whole company. It was a really hard decision, to leave engineering and step into corporate management, but my passion for leadership, D&I and education is what pushed me to give it a try.
I moved to the People & Culture division, and started with a small team called People Programs, that was in charge of diversity & inclusion, people and leadership development. Six months later, the team had grown a little from internal transfers and we had a better idea of our long-term strategy, so we decided to incorporate the Language Education team into the group, finally launching Mercari’s Learning & Development group. From last December, I also took over the management of the Global Operations teams (the internal teams of translators and interpreters), mainly due to a company reorganization, but with the new goal to align the efforts towards people development, diversity & inclusion, language and communication support.
That’s where I am now. I’m currently the group manager for Learning & Development, Diversity & Inclusion and Global Operations at Mercari, leading 4 managers and a total of about ~20 people. I’m still a director of Women Who Code and I’m involved in a few other side-projects like the SpeakHer website and creating my personal content. I also had the pleasure to speak at several events and conferences, and take a few leadership trainings that also had a great impact on my professional and personal life.
These were extremely eventful 10~12 years of my life, so of course, this is barely a high-level summary. To keep the size manageable (and it’s still pretty long, I know), I had to omit several details, including a multitude of feelings, thoughts, events, and people who were critical in many parts of this journey.
Career paths and success
Before I talk about some lessons learned along the way, I want to talk about the myth of “success” as a single definition. We tend to look at career paths and try to put a label of “successful” or not on ourselves and others, as if success was some kind of absolute metric.
But there is no universal definition of success, and of course, no “benchmark” of what a successful career looks like. Some people would look at my journey and think it’s great, full of accomplishments. Some people would say that I’ve made some stupid decisions and that, given my opportunities, I could have achieved so many other things by now. And that’s natural because we all value different things.
To keep a positive mindset (and maintain a decent level of self-esteem), I prefer to not have a benchmark and I avoid comparing myself to others. We all have unique situations, different personal values, and therefore, different priorities throughout our lives and careers (and our priorities usually change over time too). That’s why I prefer to look at my career only in regards to my own expectations and what I was optimizing for in different moments of my life.
And to be clear, I’m not gonna say that I don’t care about money or status at all. Like anyone else, I do. And money was certainly a big incentive when changing jobs and moving out of Brazil. But overall, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a position where I’m able to care about money only to a certain extent, which means I could focus on other priorities when making life decisions.
And with that being said, here’s what I believe I’ve optimized my career for and what I consider to be my successes:
My life experiences: how much I was able to experience in all areas of life and work, the great memories I’ve made so far.
Contributing to society: how much I have been able to give back and help people around me or causes that I care about.
Making meaningful personal connections: how much I’ve connected with other people, sometimes even in brief but powerful moments.
My personal growth: with all these experiences plus a lot of self-reflection, I’m actually really proud of everything I was able to learn and how much I grew as a person throughout my journey.
Now, if you’re at a point in your life in which you value similar things and you’d be interested in some of my lessons learned and advice, you can go ahead and read the next section.
Lessons Learned (so far)
As I’ve already mentioned a few times across this article, but just in case you skipped straight into this section, I’d like to acknowledge the huge amount of privilege, support, and luck I’ve had so far. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that anyone can have a similar career path as me just by “working hard” (especially since I don’t feel like I’ve worked “hard” per se…).
So let’s get that out of the way: besides a ton of privilege, luck, and support I’ve had along the way, in regards to things that I have control over (like my behaviors and how I spent my time), I’ve learned the following lessons:
Be proactive. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. If you don’t try, you won’t have any results.
Had I waited for other people to tell me what to do, I wouldn’t have done half of the things I did. No one told me to go run for student union vice-president, but I asked questions and made it happen. No one told me to apply to any of my jobs, I just found them myself and did it. People actually discouraged me from trying to work abroad, so yeah, I’d say don’t even wait for “encouragement and motivation”.
Basically, don’t wait for anyone to come and tell you what to do. Make your choices, ask questions and take action on your own.
Be a fast learner & develop critical thinking: first, absorb as much information as possible, then, on a second look, start questioning why things work the way they do.
This is especially useful when taking on new things, where you initially have a lot to learn, but later your own formed opinions and suggestions will be valuable as well.
E.g.: Onboarding in a new company, team, technology or project. Doing any activity for the first time.
Stay humble, there’s always more to learn. Listen/read before assuming you know better.
The worst thing you can do is assume that you know everything about something. You will come off as arrogant, and not learn anything new.
If you give people and situations the “benefit of the doubt” and listen to what they have to say first, you may learn something you weren’t aware of, or at least have a lot more context when you give opinions and suggestions later.
Make meaningful & honest connections with people around you. Empathy can open a lot of doors.
It goes beyond networking or “politics”. Humans are social beings, and life gets a lot easier when you have true friends and allies.
Nothing better than this book to explain the importance of empathy and people skills (summary here).
Trust your future self. There are many things you may not know how to do yet, but trust that you will figure it out.
Remember the first point about proactivity? Don’t let fear, anxiety, and overthinking hold you back from taking action. Those feelings are normal, but we tend to overestimate consequences (of failures AND successes), so every time you’re hesitant about making a decision or taking action, ask yourself: “realistically, what’s the worst that could happen?”
E.g.: When applying to a new job, when invited to a professional event, etc
Expose yourself to opportunities, and grab onto them when they show up. Be creative & optimistic, you can uncover “hidden” opportunities if you’re paying attention with a positive and creative mindset.
You can practice this, but in every conversation I have, I’m always carefully listening to what others are saying to identify points of common interest or something I can expand on. This not only helps in socializing in general (as you become able to talk about basically any topic), but it also uncovers or creates opportunities where least expected.
My best example is in volunteering. Initially, you may think that volunteering means “donating your time for a good cause”, which is partially true, but it’s also an opportunity to learn skills, meet people and find motivation by doing something you care about. I cannot stress enough how all my volunteer work for student organizations and WWCode helped me develop a lot of really important skills that I applied throughout my career.
In conclusion, even if something seems completely unrelated or superficially “useless”, try to look a bit deeper and make connections with things that can be useful or interesting to you. Then go back to point #1 and take action on it.
Thank you for reading this far and I hope this article was either inspiring, useful, or at least interesting to some of you. If you wanna get in touch, you can reach me on Twitter, Linkedin or Instagram.
