Meet Federico, one of the dedicated and ambitious young new developers from our Argentina office. His passion for technology and the IT industry drew him to Hotovo, known for its vibrant culture, enthusiastic work ethic and, of course, quality software development! Find out about his recent trip to HQ in Košice, the cultural differences he noticed, his future professional goals, and a little about his personal life too.

I know you’re still a student. Tell us what you study in Argentina, and how do you combine it with work?

I’ve been studying a digital systems degree for five years now, and I am currently in my final year actually. My university is called UAI, short for Universidad Abierta Interamericana – it's a university open to American students. I have lessons three times a week, so I study late at night. During the day I focus on work.

Why did you decide to join Hotovo? What was the trigger for you?

The culture, first of all. Slovak culture and also the culture of the company itself. Not only in terms of how the company clearly takes pride in and enjoys the work it does as an IT company, but also how everyone within the company behaves and makes the work itself so enjoyable – they play games and have fun alongside all the hard work; they play, they work, they do lots of things that are really cool for me. I first heard about it via LinkedIn, and I went through three different interviews. I enjoyed the interview with the CTO most because it was a 100%-technical interview. The other ones were more about human resources, about the position of the company.

What project are you currently working on? 

I'm currently working on a project for the client PolyAPI. I was allocated this project because it has a connection with AI, which is quite new, and really interesting for me. I'm a DevOps engineer. I work as DevOps more from the infrastructure perspective. I have a lot of stuff to learn in order to keep growing, but I feel confident and comfortable with this project, and as I keep learning I hope I’ll take on new roles and be able to create new things. I’d like to be a team lead at some point, and maybe become a new cloud provider or create something important.

How do people react when you tell them that you work for a Slovak company? I imagine it's not that common in Argentina 🙂

I have friends who also work for foreign companies remotely. But they’re mostly American companies so yeah, people are really surprised when I mention Slovakia specifically. When I told my friends they said: “Wow, I can’t imagine that.” They don't know too much about the culture so I'm trying to introduce that as well whenever I tell people who I work for. 

How have you enjoyed this trip to Košice? 🙂

Yeah, it’s been very good. It’s been interesting too, I’ve had some really clear impressions about the culture just from walking around the streets here in Košice too. For example, the one that comes to my mind first - on Saturday night I was walking around the city and there was nobody around. I was thinking, “What happened? Where is everyone?”. Saturday night is the best moment to go out and have fun, have some drinks… well, I was out around midnight, or even later. And now I know that here in Slovakia that’s late. In Argentina the situation and the culture is different, people go out much later. But here you’re used to hanging out or doing things earlier.

When you’re back in Argentina and think about this trip, what do you think will come to mind most? 

Well, the first thing is the differences that we have in terms of culture. For example, how you greet. We’re used to kissing another person on the cheek, but here you use handshakes, which is really interesting because that’s really a huge difference between both countries. And I will definitely remember the whole meetup, which I was a speaker at. It's quite common to go to events like the meetup in Argentina, and talk about lots of topics, not only technology. There are many events for lots of different purposes.

And how did you feel when you were talking to the audience? 

I thought that I was going to be more nervous, but I wasn't 🙂 It was really cool. I expected, maybe, more questions from the audience.

Tell us something about yourself. Do you have any hobbies?

Yeah, well I really like doing sports. I breakdance, which is also called breakin’. Breakdance is a more commercial name which most people know, but breakin’ is the current one in the culture of that type of dance, and basically it’s a street dance that takes place wherever or however. I’ve been breakin’ for more than 10 years. I really love it and I really love the idea of traveling around the world.

For me it’s one of the things that makes me 100% happy! I hope one day I’ll visit other countries in Europe as well, such as France, and Spain – which is a culture quite similar to Argentina, the same language, similar lifestyle. And also I really love London. So yeah, I hope to visit them.