Demand Excellence: Don’t Be The Smartest Person In The Room
Fair warning — this is an unapologetic sales pitch.
If you don’t mind being the only person in your company that can solve the really hard problems, then you should stop reading now. If, however, you wouldn’t mind being in a room of people that make your brain hurt, then please keep reading…
You’re the person that solves everybody’s problems. Visiting your family inevitably entails playing help desk. You’re the first person colleagues call when something breaks. While you’re capable of being your work’s one-stop IT and technology expert, you’re tired of carrying more than your weight. If these scenarios sound all too familiar, then come work with us. I suspect you just might love the challenge.
We need to hire hundreds of people for just one role in our Sales/Customer Engineering Team this year. I used to worry how I’d continue to make an impact at Google as it grew to become a larger and larger company. In some respects, we are a giant company (>72K employees). Yet despite this size, my work with individual customers is very personal. I have a profound impact on their ability to change and improve their world, and this type of work is exhilarating pretty much every day.
This intense focus on making individual customers our priority is why we changed our name from “Sales Engineering” to “Customer Engineering.” We aren’t just selling solutions, we’re helping our customers leverage Google technology to its maximum effects. This technology spans from hosted offerings on GCP to open source software like Tensor Flow. Every month I have the chance to work with a range of customers tackling different challenges using cutting edge technology, and help legacy companies break free from the shackles of legacy technology. Successfully tackling these challenges has a profound impact on both my customers and my own satisfaction.
Cloud started as a 20% project back in 2006, when Google ran all of its services in containers. Containers were an incredibly powerful way to abstract engineering away from infrastructure, and a vastly different approach from anything else in the industry. While we wanted to bring this same productivity to the rest of the world, we knew the radically different paradigm it presented might be difficult for others to embrace. AppEngine came into being when some clever engineers (I’m thinking of you, Kevin!) decided to expose this technology in an easily consumable form. While AppEngine greatly deepened my love of Google and my aspiration to work there, I never thought that my economics background would qualify me to become a Google engineer. In fact, despite my technical background, my lack of a computer science degree led the company to turn me away from a few positions. But through persistence and what seemed like some elaborate con at the time, I eventually found my way to Google.
Back when I ran an IT department, my job was was all about helping workers be productive as cheaply as possible. My work in consulting always focused on staying one step ahead of the customer. At Google, my job centers on using technology to push boundaries. The stakes are high: we’re helping companies lift and shift and at times rebuild their business-critical workloads to Google Cloud. These systems and applications are the essence of each company. If they fail, then the company fails. Customers come to us because no other platform can meet their demands. These high stakes mean that deep engineering details — down to mundane details like time — really matter. For example clock drift is never more than 10 ms away from any other machine in our network (see TrueTime). While this detail seems minor, it has a profound impact on the way engineers can build their applications. For example, leveraging TrueTime, Spanner is able to achieve global consistency within 7ms. Did you know it takes > 220ms to transfer data from India to the US? In this case, our ability to deliver hyper-quick data transfers means that we greatly reduce fraudulent overdrawing transactions in banking systems.
So what exactly is a Customer Engineer? A Customer Engineer is an engineer and technical advisor. We help customers understand our technology, but more importantly, we help customers understand the art of the possible — not just with our current technology, but the technology we’re developing. By deeply understanding how our customers use technology, we collaboratively help them build a target architecture influenced by and using Google technology. This task involves diving deep with our customers’ core engineering teams on the biggest challenges they face. By understanding the nuances of these challenges, we can bring in the right experts to best equip our Customer Engineers. As they gain experience, new Customer Engineers develop and hone their expertise to become to experts that train the next set.
Are you still interested? Good. We have a lot of openings. Even if you don’t have a “traditional” CS background, don’t be shy — apply to become a Customer Engineer.
If people like this and ask, my next post will be a shockingly transparent look at the interview process, even including some questions we will ask you during the process.
Keep curious and and carry on!
-Justin Hartung