My name is Federico Gomez-Suarez.
I'm originally from Pueblo, Mexico.
Most of my family are engineers
but they are engineers who do things
with their hands
I turned out to be an engineer who codes
I write software which scans images
looking for bad images. Images that we know are illegal.
I work very closely with organizations like the national center for missing children
at the end of the day the kind of content that we work on is content
we just don't want to have online and we are impacting the people who have been
affected by that content
I'm just making sure it doesn't get distributed again. When I was about 12 or 13
there was a research lab close to where. I used to live. Turned out that they needed.
Someone who could code, I really couldn't code at that time but I said I'll do it.
I'll work on this for the summer so I started working at the lab and I had
there my book of C language that I was just reading through trying to learn how
to move this little engine and it took me forever to just figure it out but
eventually worked. I just enjoy doing it
I would stay late at night until I started working and I realized that
there was something I really liked doing. When I was in my freshman year in Mexico, in a
small school I decided I wanted to work for any other big companies in the US so
I sent my resume to every company I knew
and I didn't hear anything for a year. All of the sudden, I got an email saying
Microsoft was coming to recruit and I prepared, went all in and I didn't pass
the first interview but they saw that I was so passionate about doing something
with code that they interviewed me the next year and after that I ended up coming
here to Microsoft. To solve a real-life problem is not only about the code, the
code is a piece of it but you need to think about the whole in a system. And Microsoft
has people who have expertise in all the different areas so I meet with lawyers
I meet with business analyst. I meet with different people in the company to be
able to understand the problem better and together trying to really find a
solution. Usually I spend the mornings meetings and do that kind of work and then in
evening I just put my headphones on and you start coding. Find something that
you're passionate about like a problem in the world that you think is important
and then look how you can partner with nonprofit or find people who are
already working there and help them. You know use your skill, use your passion, use
your energy to help solve a problem. You will realize that you can bring a lot to
the table, come up with new ideas on how you can have impact, just keep knocking
doors eventually one does open.
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