Before becoming a Software Engineer, I had a few jobs that helped me grow and expand my horizons. In this post, I’ll talk about my first “job” as a Street Vendor up to when I became a Logistics Assistant, saved 50 hours per week of a manager role, got a promotion, then got fired for taking too many risks.
Street Vendor
Income: $20-$100 per week.
Working Days: 2 per week.
Age: 7-10 years old.
My aunt was a full-time street vendor in São Paulo. She sold all random things you can imagine, from small batteries up to clothes. During my childhood, I spent a lot of time with her, and in multiple ocasions, I would go to free market and sell those items. I also sold biscuits in buses during São Paulo rush hours, with a friend from the church - in 2 occasions. My mom would also cook some home-made ice cream, which I’d sell around our neighborhood.
Being a stree vendor requires a lot of social skills and resilience, because you have to convince people to spend their money on products they were not planning to buy. This gets even worse if you have to sell low-quality products, such as the ones me and my aunt sold. If you had a bad sleep the night before, you need to learn how to put a smile on your face and pretend to be the happiest person on earth; otherwise, you won’t be able to provide for your family.
Social Skills
My aunt was better than Steve Jobs when the topic was elevator pitch: she mastered how to make connections with people and this was more than enough to ensure she would live a life without a boss for more than two decades by selling products in the streets of São Paulo. She was loved by literally anyone the moment she entered the room. She was so good at socializing that people would buy her products just because they wanted to have a good conversation with her.
I, at the other hand, was a very quiet and observing child.
Why would I try to sell a product for someone that didn’t ask for it?
Why would I smile to someone that I don’t even know?
Why do I have to be nice to someone that is not even nice to me?
As a very shy kid, my brain was full of those thoughts and I simply couldn’t become a social butterfly overnight. However, I could see the impact my aunt’s social skills had in our lives, I knew I had to try to be more social. The only mistake here was that I didn’t know I would need constant support - which I never really had for various reasons, including the fact my whole family was trying to survive without formal education and social inequalities. Supporting me in my journey to become more social was the least of their concerns.
Lessons Learned
It took me more than 20 years to figure out how to become more social. Once I learned, I decided I don’t want to. I learned being my best self, shy, is more important then being social. In fact, I learned the more I respect my uniqueness, the more happy I become.
Resilience
Incidents are events that require an intervention or response. Incidents can be the result of normal operation and activity. - AWS
You also have to deal with scams: people giving you fake money or trying to steal your products. I was 7 years old when a lady approached me and asked for a product, which costs 5 usd. She game me a 20 usd, which I had excahnge in a nearby shop. When I arrived, folks realized it was fake and then I got back as fast as I could - maybe she didn’t know it was fake, right?! Both the product and her soul were gone by the time I returned.
Five Whys
Five whys helps in identifying the root cause of a problem by determining the relationship between different root causes of a problem. - AWS
1. Why I didn’t check if the note was fake before leaving the shop?
Because I was too excited to sell the product and didn’t think she could try to scam me.
2. Why I didn’t think she could try to scam me?
Because I thought people would only do bad things to you as a response to bad things you do to them. Since I was being nice to her, I thought she would be nice to me in return.
3. Why did she gave me a fake note?
Because she was a scammer. She decided to take advantage of a 7 years old kid to get a product for free.
4. Why was she a scammer?
There are 99 reasons for people to become scammers, such as the result of the historical trajectory (social and economic disparities) set by Pedro Alvares Cabral more than 500 years ago.
5. Why colonization of Brazil contributed to scamming?
- Short answer: Because social imbalances - left behind by Colonialism - push individuals toward unethical behaviors as a means to cope and survive.
- Long answer: Nowadays, as a Software Engineer, part of my job is to influence people different than me to do things I find relavant to the business - including when they don’t agree with me. If I establish and maintain control and exploitation of those individuals, what do you think the result would be?
Lessons Learned
Never leave the shop unattended. Never trust people who are not from my family. Always check if money is fake or not.
Flyer Distribution
Income: $50 per day.
Working Days: 2 per week.
Age: 12-14 years old.
Plaza Sul Shopping
Distribution of flyers in the streets and traffic of São Paulo is a common practice for young folks in Brazil. My first job as a flyer distributor was for a company that restored car’s seats. Every weekend, I’d distribute two hundred flyers to cars stopped by a traffic light in front of Plaza Sul Shopping. Given how shy I was back then, and how hot the sun was close to lunch time, it was quite challenging.
Uncle’s Pizzeria
My uncle opened a Pizzeria, and the best way to let customers know there is a new player in the neighborhood was to distribute flyers. Every weekend, he would drop me with give hundred flyers and I’d distrubute them in the streets nearby. It was an overly repetitive job - one flyer at a time being thrown inside a house - there were five hundred of them, so it would always take me hours before I could finish distributing. My feet hurt really bad and I couldn’t think about anything else other than:
How many flyers do I have left? Am I close to the end?
What do I have to do, so that I never have to do this again?
Well, at the age of 11-14 (yeah, my memory sucks), I didn’t have many options, so I chose the best option I had at that time: I threw some of them in the bin. lol. Sorry, uncle, I was learning, it was a necessary experience to understand my own limits.
Printing Service
Income: pizza and minimum wage.
Working Days: 5 days peer week.
Age: 12-15 years old.
My uncle also owned a printing service, which I would ocassionally help him with. At the end of the shift, we would eat a good Brazilian Pizza. Good deal, right?
Sometime between 12 and 15 years old, I asked him to work full-time. It was the first time I was paid more than a hundred dollars per month; it was also the first time I had to work on a schedule, from Monday to Friday. Being able to pay for my own expenses was a big deal for me, but I don’t remember how I spent the money other than with fast food. Lots of it.
It was a family business. That’s where I met my cousin-in-law, Vagner. Vagner was older than me. He had a car and goals in life. I was just a teenager trying to figure out how to survive. Vagner also liked to party. A lot!
Taking risks: a nap on the bathroom
One day, me and Vagner went to a party, on a Sunday evening. We had a good time. So good we didn’t even sleep and went to work the next day. I could barely stand still, but I tried my best. I was so tired that I slept on the bathroom. 2 hours later, I left the bathroom after the crowd at work was wondering if I was dead or alive. My uncle was furious, but he didn’t fire me.
The excitement lasted for a few months, because the work was manual and brutally repetitive - I’d literally repeat the same task over and over again, for 8 hours a day. Piles of paper to fold. It was a torture.
A few months later, I got fired. Thanks uncle!
Lessons Learned
Family-owned business has a lower entry barrier. Party should always come after work, not before. Repetitive tasks are highly detrimental to my level of satisfaction.
LAN center
Income: $400 per month.
Working Days: 5 per week.
Age: 16 years old.
Back in 2006, Brazil was giving free bus rides to elderly people, in an attempt to provide them with a better quality of life. Many of them wanted to travel cross-state, so they would head over to one of the busiest bus terminals in Brazil. There was a LAN center in that bus terminal that offered printing services - that’s where elderly people would go to print their bus tickets.
My first interview
One of the bus drivers told my mom the LAN center was hiring, so I applied. I don’t remember much from that interview, but I do recall me and the manager had a coffee together and chatted about the role. I was a bit confused why he was so cool with me, but later I realized paying less than the minimum wage for a teenager to work in a highly stressful environment was a good deal, for him. Regardless, it was one of the best interviews I’ve ever had. Thanks for the chat, Mr. Manager!
So, I got the job: 20 hours per week, 4 hours per day, 5 days a week. I was paid $400 per month. So far so good, except, I had to open the LAN center at 6am sharp. If the LAN center didn’t open on time, it would get fined. To this day, I still don’t know how much the fine was, but given how broken Brazilian culture is, I’m pretty sure it was a lot. Thanks Mr. Manager for never telling me how much it was, because…
Social Skills
The job consisted of opening and operating the LAN center, talking to customers (a lot of them) and printing bus tickets to elderly people. Operating the computers was easy, but dealing with customers was brutally stressful. Because it was a bus terminal, I would easily speak to 50-100 people per day. At the end of my shift, I was exausted. Many people didn’t even know how to use a computer, and they would get angry if they couldn’t achieve what they wanted, the way they wanted it.
At the flip side, because I spoke English, many foreigners would come to me to ask for help. One day, a visitor from the US stopped by to ask for help and stayed for several hours talking about life and how life in US is so much easier than in Brazil. It was the first time I spoke with a foreigner in English, and I sounded like Lil Wayne after the first 40 minutes - so good.
Lessons Learned
Dealing with customers was challenging and required a lot of patience. Conversation is one of the best ways to practice a new language (English).
Taking risks: sleeping at my desk
Considering my history of going to work after party, 6am was way too early for a young teenager making $400 per month and learning how to have fun. History repeated itself: I went to a party on Sunday evening, didn’t sleep and went straight to work. I was so tired that I slept on my desk multiple times. Customers would literally poke me to wake me up, multiple times. I don’t remember exactly what happened that day, but I didn’t get fired.
Lessons Learned
I must never party on Sunday evening. I’m not a morning person.
Delivery (by bus)
Income: minimum wage.
Working Days: 5 per week.
Age: 17 years old.
I worked as the delivery person for a dental prostheses company, which was a family-owned business from one of my friends. My job was to deliver the prostheses to the dentist’s office by public transport. I liked to travel by bus, so I thought it was a good deal. I’d deliver from 2 to 4 dental prostheses per day and travel 100km max. Buses in Brazil were noisy, dirty and crowded, so this was a way to practice my resilience.
Lessons Learned
Repetitive tasks are highly detrimental to my level of satisfaction, even if they are a little bit dynamic, such as traveling around the city by bus.
Logistics
Income: minimum wage.
Working Days: 5 per week.
Age: 17 years old.
My aunt-in-law was a production line manager at a business that built healthy meals kit for big coorporations, such as banks and the government. They were deeply involved with social programs too.
The Role
I was hired as a logistics assistant, and my role was to organize and dispatch food supplies to the production line, wait for them to be cooked, and then fit as much meals kit as I could in an industrial freezer. At the end of my shift, right before I leave, I’d get the meals kit outside of the freezer and help delivery drivers load them into their trucks. My manager did all of that plus the delivery route planning and delivery fee negociations for all drivers.
Opportunity: Delivery Route Planning
I didn’t have a computer back then, but I was already familar with Google Maps and how to find places. My manager was still using a printed map and he would take 2 hours to finish the route planning. Each driver were given a route to follow, on a A4 piece of paper. Hand written.
One day, before leaving work, I logged into the computer and did the route planning using Google Maps. It took me 20 minutes from start to finish, and all I had to do at the end was to push a “print” button and hand it over to my manager - which received it with a big smile in his face. From that day onwards, I was the one doing the route planning. A few months later, my manager left the company, and I got a promotion.
Results
- Saved 100 minutes per day to plan routes. It’s a total of 50 hours per month.
- Optimized routes by distance and traffic conditions, resulting in better fueld consumption.
- Optimized truck capacity to fit more meals kit.
- Trained drivers on how to use Google Maps to plan their own routes.
Opportunity: Delivery Fee Negotiations
After my manager left the company, the CEO took ownership of delivery fee negotiations. Every day, he would discuss with the drivers about the available routes and the delivery fee. I didn’t know at the time, but he was very good at it. So good, he managed to offer me a $100 raise to replace my manager and I accepted. lol. Thanks for the opportunity, Mr. CEO.
The thing is, I was good with numbers, not with people. So I didn’t know how to deal with people telling me they should get more pay, or that the CEO was trying to cheat them. It was just too much [social] scope for a shy teenager. I managed to get through it, but I became the enemy of those drivers, for obvious reasons:
- First, I optimized the routes, so they had to drive more.
- Second, I was the one trying to make them work more, for less pay.
- Third, I was 17 years old. And those people don’t like to be outsmarted by a young teenager.
Results
- Without experience and as such a yound age, I managed to keep negotiations under control.
- The company was paying much less than the market value for the services I prodived.
Taking risks: driving a truck
I talked briefly about this on Linkedin, how I like to observe and how I learned to live by observing others. At 17 years old, I didn’t take as many risks - which is quite unusual for a teenager, unless I was passionate about something.
I observed people driving vehicles since I was a child, and it was fascinating. The only I had back then was: “have I learned enough by observing?”. So, one day, I was alone at work, it was quiet, it was probably 3am in the morning (yeah, my working schedule were from 10pm to 7am), and I had the keys to a brand new truck the company had bought. I don’t really remember what was my motivation, but I do recall having this passion about driving cars… so, I jumped in the drivers seat, turned the key and pressed play. I drove it around the city. I felt the happiest Mario I’ve ever been. I drove back to work before folks arrived in the morning and played dumb.
The day after, the main truck driver realized the odometer moved a few KMs. He told the CEO something was off. Two days later the CEO calls me in his office. He showed me the security camera footage and wonders “why?”. My honest answer was more or less like as follows:
Well, I always wanted to drive a vehicle and I couldn’t help it when I saw the opportunity.
I cannot explain why I took the risk, but we can both see in the video I know how to drive it. I don’t actually regret it, to be honest. It’s ok if you have to fire me.
See, I didn’t expect him to caught me, but I also wasn’t particularly afraid of the consequences. Back then, I was about to get married, and I realized I was able to make an impact if I was empowered to do so. That being said, fiding another job was the least of my concerns.
Now, giving the context I was in back then, it was not a big of a deal. Taking that risk, achieving my goal and later being fired, taught me a lot about risk management. See, even though I was wrong and the CEO was angry, he was angry because I was able to make an impact in a short period of time and he would need to let me go, not necessarily because I messed up.
In a different occasion, he told me something that stick to my brain:
You are like a balloon in a swimming pool. Those who try to hold you back are merely pushing you down. But the moment you burst free, you will soar into the sky.
Lessons Learned
- Risk taking is one of the most important skills I can develop.
- Businesses care more about outcomes than processes.
- Age [alone] does not equals experience.