My thoughts on getting started in IT - Part III

In the last posts, I addressed technical and behavioral aspects that, based on my experience, I thought it was nice to share for people interested in entering the IT field.

An important point that deserves a separate approach was missing, English.

Nowadays with generative AIs, many people are abandoning literature and documentation. Which is a mistake, because technical materials don’t run the risk of hallucinating and don’t agree with you when you’re wrong.

Many quality materials are in English. And unfortunately, most pioneering materials are still produced abroad first. Most companies you’ll work for, even Brazilian ones, by default use English to write code, functions, variable names, documentation, etc. So it’s extremely important to have knowledge of the language to be able to insert yourself faster in any context.

And another important point is that knowing English opens new portals in your personal and professional life.

Recently I started my career in a company abroad working remotely from Brazil. I’ve never taken an English course or done an exchange because when I was young my mother barely had money to pay for my school and after I got older, it’s difficult to take 6 months off for an exchange when you have bills to pay. So I learned like any resourceless young person: I did what I could. I learned out of curiosity to understand games, voluntarily exposed myself to readings in English, watching subtitled movies and series, gradually removing the subtitles. All this helped me a lot in reading, writing and comprehension.

But conversation is a separate case. I was fully capable of understanding anything said to me. But I had a great insecurity when speaking. I joined some business discussion groups on social networks a few years ago to be able to exchange ideas about various “business” subjects and be able to unlock. Even so, I didn’t feel “fluent” to the point of doing an interview. But it was when doing my first interview in English that I saw I knew more than I imagined. Being able to do a technical interview with live coding, all in English was something that broke my resistances.

I believe many people go through the same problem: lack of confidence. And the best way is to expose yourself. And foreigners judge accent and pronunciation less than Brazilians. Don’t take it into account if you’ve already done some selection process in Brazil and they judged you badly for your accent or something like that, people here are really annoying about it. They only want level 10 on the Geller scale from my friend Leonardo Marconi.

Therefore, expose yourself, speak English with foreigners, keep learning, making mistakes, improving, studying. Don’t forget about reading, you build a better vocabulary the more you read. There’s no point speaking well if you only know how to talk nonsense.

If anyone is reading this and wants to give any suggestions about subjects for those who want to enter IT, just get in touch.

I hope I helped!

Cheers!