Tech Cupid Tales: the benefits of living abroad with Google engineer, Alex Badescu

Passionate people are the heart and soul of Carbon and there’s no better time to celebrate passion than in February. So we’re taking the opportunity to spotlight some of the impressive people in our ever-growing network.

In this interview, Carina hears from Alex Badescu, a senior software engineer at Google, about his journey and the life-changing lessons he learned from living abroad.

Alex has worked with global teams like Microsoft, Fitbit and Google and has worked on some of the biggest products in the market. Now, he’s back in Romania working with exceptional local tech talent.

Carina: What made you decide to become a software engineer?

Alex: It started when I was five years old. I remember seeing my dad working on a computer and he was doing some very advanced stuff. He was trying to see if we could terraform Mars, which is pretty interesting. I was fascinated by the thought of telling an inanimate object to do something for you, possibly something that's really hard or nearly impossible for you to do as an individual.

When I was 12, I started reading a computer science book called “The Computer Your Desk Companion”, and that's when I knew that I wanted to be a software engineer. And it was very interesting because I knew from a very early age what I wanted to do, and I haven’t deviated from that thought ever since.

Not everyone is lucky enough to know what they want to do when they graduate from high school, but Alex did. He studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Bucharest and started his career as a platform architect at Alpha Bank during his senior year. A few years later he moved to Oslo, Norway, to join Microsoft.

Carina: What were some of the challenges you faced when you moved to Norway?

Alex: I wasn’t aware of what I was getting myself into. I knew nothing about Norway – nothing about the culture, nothing about the language, basically nothing apart from the fact that the Nordic countries are known for the high quality of life they offer. Probably the most difficult thing was the language. Not speaking the language was, let's say, frustrating. It was a big shock in terms of lifestyle and changing friends. It was something that struck me the first day I got there, until that point it had felt like going on vacation, but after the first day, I realised it was actually happening.

Regarding the company, it was a major step up compared to what I was doing before. Everything was bigger at Microsoft – the products, the plans, the ambition – everything had exponentially grown. It was very rewarding and a huge investment on my part to become a better software engineer. But honestly, it was incredible. It was probably the best team I’ve ever worked in.

So to sum up: there were a lot of challenges, but there was a lot of growth as well.

Carina: You mentioned growth, do you mean personal growth as well as career growth?

Alex: The only question I needed to answer was if I could get a great career and work with quality engineers here locally. That wasn't happening in Romania at the beginning of the 2010s. We didn’t have big product companies locally, so Romania was doing a lot of outsourcing, but that was changing, slowly but surely.

I felt like [Fitbit] could be a product company that could deliver what I wanted for my career. And another important aspect was my family and friends who were all here. Apart from the awesome team that I had in Oslo, there was nothing tying me to Norway. So I thought it would be a good time to change, but I wouldn't have come back if I didn't think I would have had a great company to go to and great career prospects.

Carina: From a leadership perspective do you think that an experience working abroad is beneficial to an engineer's career?

Alex: There are good projects happening in Romania that you can pursue locally but from the point of view of growing as a person, nothing changes you like experiencing other cultures. It’s a true embedded experience to live among people and be confronted with different ways of thinking.

One of the biggest pain points in getting things done is trying to understand other people – the people you work with, and the people that you're trying to serve as customers. The more you expand the way you think and the more diverse people you interact with, the better equipped you are to deal with different types of people. So, I think that going and working outside of your home country is really rewarding, a real opportunity for growth and is for sure going to help you along this journey.

Carina: Finally, you’ve studied a lot of programming languages, do you have a favourite one? And why?

Alex: The language that I first fell in love with was C#. I got hooked on the Microsoft ecosystem very early on, which you can see across my career – I’ve worked there a couple of times. So, I kind of got sucked into their ecosystem and that's the language that resonated the most. Even if I don't write it right now, I still follow everything around it, including what the team is doing, how they’re improving the language, and so on.

Carbon is the go-to staffing specialist for Eastern European and North African technical talent. Trusted by the biggest names in technology and venture capital, Carbon’s hyperlocal expertise makes entering new talent markets for value-seeking global companies possible.

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