I was his intern for 2 years. It was my first job. The title? Product Engineer intern. What does it have to do with Electrical Engineer? Not much, indeed. Here’s how it happened: one day, Andressa Ruviaro Almeida (the kindest and most generous colleague of our class), came to me and said: “I know you’ve been looking for an internship. My neighbour (Marcos Vinícius Lopes Paixão) has an open position. Would you be interested?“. I remember accepting just because she had gone the extra mile to propose something for me. I had done several interviews at different companies with no particular success and I was 100% sure that this would follow the same pattern. I did no preparation at all, barely knew something about Thales Digital Identity and Security (ex Gemalto).
When entering the building for the interview, I was shocked. Everyone dressed with uniforms, every square meter very well cleaned, a huge open space where teams were working close to each other, all conference rooms with transparent glass walls. I immediately wished I had took this chance more seriously. Miraculously, I eventually got accepted.
Although still impressed by the building, I had no clue whether working as a Product Engineer intern would payoff. But, as the days went by, I was more and more happy working there. Besides having a great culture and team work, Marcos Paixão was the main driver. For the next 2 years, not only he was a role model leader, offering feedback, advice and correction measures when needed, he noticed my appreciation for programming. I learned so much from him about Excel and all its capabilities. We’ve automated a lot our own jobs and even some of the other teams. That’s my first memory of my passion for programming, which ended up being a core activity of what I do today.
One time, we sent around 50 credit cards with the wrong information stored in the chip. Someone had to call around 30 offices explaining the situation, proposing a solution that would be best for us which required some actions from their personnel. They had no legal obligation in agreeing with that. My first call was terrible, I was not clear to do any of the above tasks and failed miserably. Marcos was next to me, he heard everything and knew I had a done poor job. He said: ”yeah, that’s was not good, but you need to calm down, take a look again at the case and give it another try. You’ll get better over time.” Honestly, I had zero confidence that it would get any better, ever so slightly. Surprisingly, he was right. By the 5th call, it was breeze. Even though I had no repertoire back then to understand what happened, I could feel how powerful it was.
Working in an industry with quality & planning teams, an assembly line, etc, also helped me later on when studying about optimization methods, linear programming, Markov chain, Petri net. I had a clear mental model in real situations where those techniques could be applied on.
I’m grateful now for how lucky I was to work with you and all the people in Gemalto. I want to thank you for betting on me; for noticing something I had interest on and assigning me challenges to develop it; for being a mentor and leading by example.
I have great memories from all the people I’ve interacted with, thank you very much as well. Each of you contributed in this journey that influenced me to contribute in fostering an inspiring work environment