Intro

Hi, I am Osvaldo Mercado and I want to thank you for stopping by and for your interest in my profile. I am thrilled to see you here; recruiter, hiring manager or soon to be colleague!

echo 'hi! ' . $yourName; 

console.log('hello! ' + user.name)

printf "%s\\n" "$yourname"

Why an #AMA?

Getting to know a candidate in a short period of time can be tough. I've been on the other side myself too many times as a hiring manager. Candidates get anxious, nervous or the resume makes no sense for the position they are applying to... all of these can lead to a non-productive "get to know each other" meeting.

With the above in mind, I created this space as if I was interviewing myself for a leadership role and where each section contains 5 questions or less, and where the goal is to explain my managerial & technical experience as well as professional interests in less than 10 mins.

The below AMA is intended to be written with the thought of Paul Graham’s “write like you talk”.

What’s your overall experience?

I am an IT industry professional with +13 years of experience in a variety of industries such as gaming, fintech, content creation/delivery, healthcare, enterprise, banking, and consulting, and with working experience in 3 continents of the world. The above experiences led me to understand and learn different aspects of each job, specific industry's needs as understanding different markets for the products to be delivered. Interestingly enough, everyone seeks the same outcome: to deliver a product, yet the ways to do it, how you plan it, and the people you build it with differ can quite a bit.

What's your managerial experience like?

I´ve been coding non-stop for >13 years but 9 months into my first job I was promoted to a Team Lead position. I made every single bad decision a team lead with no experience can do, so I decided to not be that manager and started and never-ending task to improve my soft-skills. Since then, my jobs have been on&off working on the management side and the technical side, as I like both sides of the equation:

• I take enormous personal pride when my teams are pushed forward and accomplish hard and what seemed to be “unreachable” milestones. As well as when they establish a high-performing culture and establish a high sense of trust.
• I enjoy tackling technical problems as well as coming up with a new architecture that solves a complex issue at scale. Since the start of my career I've worked on engineering projects that handle millions of data entries, thus I became accustomed rather quickly to the term "scalability" and “performance”.