Alberto Gragera

Remote is here to stay , there is no question about that. It opens the market for people that for any given reason can not or don’t want to move to a particular location, and it enables companies to access talent worldwide. 1Commutes are generally terrible, specially in areas where most of the jobs are, and folks want to spend that time doing other things. Offices can be productivity sinks, with a lot of noise and distractions. Remote work is a perfect solution for folks that fall under these buckets. ...

June 1st was my last day at WhatsApp. After roughly nine months I decided to leave the company and find new challenges. Despite being a world-class organization where I had the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals, there were some things that were not the right fit for me: Relocation to London: I had to relocate to the UK for tax purposes in the middle of a global pandemic. Then the country completely shut down for nearly five months, which let’s say did not do wonders for me and my family wellbeing. Split by technology rather than product vertical: I was supporting three platform teams, that were running a bunch of projects at the same time. This approach had a lot of communication and sync overhead, and it was causing me to drift away from product and tech. This resulted in me doing a lot of work that I was able to do, but did not enjoy at all. Hello Google! I wanted something different, possibly outside the UK. I reached out to one of my HR contacts at Google and talk about the possibility of joining. The process was quite streamlined and I could not be more excited to join Youtube in Zurich by mid July! ...

I will be joining Facebook as an Engineering Manager on the WhatsApp Business team. The road until this moment has been tough, and I wanted to share my experiences throughout the process. This might help you out if you are thinking about interviewing at any of the FAANG companies. Of course your mileage may vary, but this is what worked for me. Network I had the immense luck of working with some very smart folks during my career. Folks that ended up working in the aforementioned FAANG companies, which are in Linkedin, along with the recruiters from those companies. ...

I worked at a pretty big social network in Spain from 2009 to 2013. Tuenti peaked at roughly 16 million users and 25 billion page views a month, which was pretty insane back in the day. We made it to the Google Zeitgeist for a couple of years, and in 2011 it was estimated that 15% of the internet traffic of Spain was through Tuenti, more than Google and Facebook combined. ...