At the beginning of my professional career, I never thought that one day I’ll be here working with American/Britain/Canadian and Brazilian customers. I remember the day when I started to feel uncomfortable with my current job and I decided to start a new journey looking for new experiences and growth.
I arranged interviews (with Human Resources) and technical interviews with different companies. To be honest, at that point, I ‘d never spoken with anybody in English before, so I received a lot of feedback, in most cases, telling me about my lack of vocabulary and fluency, and obviously, I didn’t get the job. But that didn’t disappoint me and I made myself the commitment to improve my English. After 10 interviews (ups!) and 2 exhaustive months practicing my English, I got the job, I mean THE JOB.
The 3 Major Differences
The first difference that you will realize in an foreign company, is the culture, for some (unknown) reason is a little bit more relaxed. Talking about the atmosphere, and the environment, you will see more common areas where all people work together, more friendly spaces. Obviously you gonna have talks with guys from other parts of the world (Indian, British, Americans, etc.) and most of them are kind because they know that you are not in your country, and if you don’t have enough vocabulary to speak with them, they don’t care and they will try to talk with you.
If you are the type of person who are not afraid to meet new people, you will start to make friends from every place (Hello Anu!).
Talking about the process of develop an application/software, foreign customers are quite enough strict, because they understand the difference between “I don’t know how to do this” and “I have never done this before”, for them is better to say “I don’t know” instead of lying.
Also, they are more meticulous reviewing and expect quality in your job. Let’s just imagine for a bit, if you want to make a pool in your backyard and you aren’t searching in your neighborhood for somebody that makes your pool, instead, you go out of your country looking for the best of best “pool maker”, what are you going to expect about his job?, so you need to improve your skills as a Developer.
Another difference is the culture of sharing knowledge. I worked on 5 Mexican companies, and I’m not saying they are bad, actually, thanks to them I’m a great developer, but, in most of Mexican companies the same employees don’t have the culture of sharing knowledge and they have a lot of “Todologos” (Mexican name for persons that do everything, when other employees are just watching because they don’t know how to do it), and that makes a bottleneck issues when they get sick or go to another company and there’s no one else that can do their tasks.
In a foreign company, it exists more desire to share knowledge, even the same employees decide to provide courses and events talking about new technologies. In my experience, I did a meetup talking about PHPUnit. It was cool and awesome how the people interacted with me. Usually, after the talk, you have time to know the audience and talk about whatever you want.
And finally, and most awaited part, the economical aspects, Uff, this is the best part. To be honest, when I was young, I always looked up to my brothers (love you, brothers, haha), that’s why I decided to enroll myself into development, and I was always worried me about my economical future. Looking into the most common websites for job seekers (Occ, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.) you will see that the most valuable and profitable jobs come from foreign companies.
If you want to jump into the foreign companies world, I will give you the next tips:
- Learn English and don’t be shy. Foreign people know that you are trying to communicate with them, think, is the same when they come to visit Mexico and they are trying to say “Cancun” or “Tacos” or “Chiapas”. Is the same scenario, they don’t speak fluently and we do our best to help them.
- Improve your skills. You need to improve always. So try to spend 1 or 2 hours just reading about a new technology or about how that technology works. Improvement is always good for your career path and for your chance to get a new and better job.
- Join meetups. Try to assist to different tech events where they are usually recruiters from different companies that are looking for talent. I also recommend this meetups as way of blending in the culture of software development.
If you want to look for new abroad opportunities ScreenIT can link you with great opportunities.
About the Author
Ivens Alberto Del Angel is a freelance BackEnd developer and Scrum master with 5 years of experience. He likes playing guitar, help new developers and talk to friends.