1.Rodrigo, you work in the Prime Nearshore team for an European fund platform. What is your work based on and what technologies do you use?

The platform for which we are working today is among the European leaders in the field of funds, which has been expanding more and more to other countries, already targeting the Asian continent, with a headquarters in Singapore. My job is to lead the PrimeIT team, so that we can develop the projects belonging to the client, with the highest possible level of quality and competence. In technological terms, we have as core technologies Microsoft .Net and SQL Server, and the system is guided by a micro services architecture.

2.How long have you been on the Prime Nearshore team and how do you describe this work experience?

I have been working at Prime Nearshore for just over a year now, and I can certainly say that it has been one of the most enriching experiences I have had during my 15 years in IT, having the privilege of learning something every day.

3.Tell us a little about your path until you came to PrimeIT? Have you ever been part of a Nearshore project before?

I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. My father is Portuguese and emigrated to Brazil when he was only 5 years old, and my mother is the granddaughter of a Portuguese citizen. So I grew up in Lusitanian culture, even though I was in Brazil, and as soon as I could, I obtained dual nationality, in case I ever intended to move to a European country. In 2005, I completed my degree in Computer Science at USJT and, in 2011, I finished my post-graduation in Software Engineering at ITA. In these almost 15 years of experience in IT, I have gone through several challenges in several areas, and in 2014 I lived one year in Australia to work and improve my English. In 2019 I made the difficult decision to leave Brazil and move to Portugal. A country that received me with open arms and I can say that I feel truly at home. The match with PrimeIT was only a matter of a few months, from the moment I arrived in the land of Cristiano Ronaldo. In almost the middle of 2019, PrimeIT presented me the project that it would start from scratch, with a completely new team and I decided to face this new challenge of working for the first time in nearshore.

4.What are the advantages, as a professional, of integrating a Nearshore project instead of face-to-face consulting with partners in Portugal?

Working in Nearshore means having a daily relationship with people from another country, without the need to move. This contact is not only technological but also cultural. In our onboarding process we spent 10 days in Sweden, which was very important to get to know each other personally and gain greater synergy with the client, thus creating an environment with much more empathy. I believe that the process of knowing the client in person, especially in the case of Nearshore, has the power to break down several barriers and make the whole sequence of work much more natural and smoother.

5.How is this experience personally enriching for you? And why is that?

When I accepted the project of starting a team from scratch, without even knowing the people I would work with and how we would do it, in the Nearshore format I knew it would be quite a challenge, and that it would bring a rich load of personal and cultural developments. Having never worked with a Nearshore project, I had many doubts and uncertainties about what that relationship with the client would be like. I was positively surprised, they are experiences that we take to life, to a professional career, and today I see no more barriers between countries, even more, after the pandemic forced all companies to start working the way we already did (remotely).

6.If you had to sum up PrimeIT/PrimeNearshore culture to a stranger, what would you say?

I have worked in several companies where the employees were only resources and I feel that PrimeIT is a company that is mostly concerned with the welfare of the consultant. The fact of having a policy focused on the happiness of each one, with feedback meetings, training initiatives, parties, internal competitions, relaxation area and so on, brings together and integrates the consultants, and transcends any seriousness of a formal environment making everything much lighter.

7.What are your expectations for the future at PrimeIT?

When it comes to Nearshore, I feel that this is a worldwide trend and one that is tending to grow more and more. There are many tools with metrics of productivity and performance of team members and, after the COVID-19 pandemic, companies realized that teams could yield as much or much more from a distance and, for this reason, I believe that this will be increasingly the future at PrimeIT and the way forward.