Switching careers in Tech, from IT to SDE; Meet Piero
Hey Piero, you’ve been with GoCardless for a while now! Which teams have you worked in during your 7.5 years here?
I started in 2016 as an IT Engineer, although I think the role was not named that way for a while, titles/roles were a little less complicated back then when we were 80 people!
I was the first internal IT function hire (and the only one for a little over 1 year) and I was in that team for the first 4.5 years, during which I established the IT function and had a ton of fun implementing all sorts of things from Device Management to ISO20071 certification/audits, security training for new employees and everything in between.
I then moved into one of the banking teams, which was called Merchant Funds, its main goal was to ensure we could track all our customer funds at any given time. The name, remit, and composition of the team have changed (and expanded!) over the years, but a lot of the core services we look after remain.
How did you find that transition from IT to Software Development Engineer?
Firstly, the “interview process” I went through was really pleasant (albeit avoiding bias by finding people to interview me, that did not know me, was kind of hard because I had onboarded a majority of people into GC as new employees 😅). Successfully completing the interview process reinforced my confidence in being able to take on the new role.
I was quite worried about the role being in the business critical path but the fear had overshadowed the fact that for that very reason, the standards for those teams were very high in terms of release safety, reviews, and quality in general.
All these things align with how I enjoy working and most importantly how I learn new things by doing it in a safe environment.
Finally, in the first month, the team was extraordinarily supportive; introducing me to Ruby, our services, and how we work. I cherish those memories and have the feeling that it has set very high standards for me and what it means to work in a software team.
If you could go back and give yourself some advice, what would that be?
Probably the most impactful thing a mentor said to me, but I did not believe them back then:
“Being a Software Developer is not hard, if I can do it, anyone can”. When I heard it from them I laughed it out, but I think the missing piece there is:
“You don’t need to know everything to do it, and it’s ok to figure it out as you go, as long as you have fun doing it”
What has been the most impactful thing you’ve worked on in your time here?
Can I pick two, one for each role?
As an IT Engineer it’s the switch to remote first when COVID-19 hit and we sent everyone home on a Friday not to return to the office until it was safe to do so. We were able to continue not only to operate, but also grow across the world, hiring high numbers of people
As an SDE it’s the work that culminated in us migrating from a Banking partner to another. This was something that started in 2018 where the technical work required us to change a number of core assumptions on which our systems were built and started taking shape around the time I joined the new team. It was a privilege for me to have been able to participate in the work that started with “this is a really hard problem” and ended up being the person who “pushed the last button” to complete the migration. Seeing it from beginning to end felt almost like magic.
Looking ahead, what are you most excited about?
GoCardless has pretty ambitious goals which means there’s potential for a lot of interesting work to be done that we can continue to scale to support our expansion and stay ahead of the curve
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