FAQs about me
What is your name?
My name is Carlos. In the UK, I usually go by Carlos Wu. But because I am a Spanish citizen, I have two surnames:
- First name: Carlos
- First surname: Wu
- Second surname: Fei
- I do not have a second name.
As a funny anecdote, I was in Boots pharmacy one day, and they wrote my first surname as my second name and my second surname as my first surname, thinking that my first surname was my second name ok, did that make sense?
What is your academic background?
I graduated in University Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, with a degree in Business Management. Afterwards, I took a Master's degree in Management Consulting, where I was trained basically to become a business analyst. Therefore, I believe I can easily take on busines tasks, such as Presentations of project proposals, drawing flowchart of business processes, diagnosis of business problems with business cases, using Excel to analyze account/financial/business data, are things that academically I have been doing for years.
Where do you live? Will you consider relocating?
As I found out from several recruiters, one of the early parameters used to filter out candidates for a role is location. My situation at the moment, as opposed to most other people, is what I call digital nomad. In my case, as opposed to the Wikipedia definition, I do not have to work remotely, but I go wherever professional opportunities appear. There are 2 basic conditions that have to be met, (1) I must be valued for my work (if you believe that my work is dispensable, that I do not add value to your organization, therefore I am not respected, there is no point in working together). (2) Monetary compensation must meet standard (local market) at least. And I will go wherever you need to me to go. Pretty simple? You'll be surprised how many companies do not meet these minimum requirements.
What are your professional goals?
I do not have very clear professional goals, as I am a realistic person, I think it depends on market demand. I love web technologies and there is a lot of demand worldwide, so that's why I started a web development career. In the short-term, I would like to become a Full Stack Javascript developer. Although in the long-term, if I must choose an ideal role, I would say that I would be most useful as a coordination link between developers writing business logic, and the actual business operation analyses.
Case: How would you describe your ideal role?
I quite often see advertised roles where a developer is asked to be able to work with business analysts, but I believe the mentality of a developer is completely different to a business person. One side is worried about system effiency, writing clean code (minimizing bugs) and ensuring output quality, while the other party is focused on satisfying deadlines, making sure all features "add value" to the final product, and as a result making a profit that minimizes cost and maximizes sales. An example of conflict would be, development maintanance tasks are quite normal and very necessary to keep bugs out of the software, apart from the fact that technologies improve constantly, and better ways to do things come up progressively. However, these tasks are not added value tasks for a business, and businesses are encouraged to remove them from the process, because they add cost to the final product. Conflicts as these, are usually hidden from developers, until the day the meeting happens or the product is launched, when reverting back is not an option. Therefore to solve them, one must forsee and prevent these conflicts before they become a problem. Business goals must be aligned with development goals.
I believe I could smooth out these differences, as I understand development better than business analysts, and I understand business better than developers. It is quite easy for me to put myself in the shoes of the other party, and therefore reach a more complete solution for daily problems.