Welcome to episode 98 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we check in on John’s lessons learned after one year as a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud.
Original Recording Date: 10-24-2020
Topics – Google Cloud 1 Year Check-in
1:48 – John’s Role at Google Cloud

* John is Customer Engineer at Google Cloud (the public cloud provider part of Google), which is a Pre-Sales Technical Engineering role.

* This type of role can be called different things at different companies – Pre-Sales Engineer, Sales Engineer, etc. Sometimes this is called a Solution Architect (depends on how the company defines it).
* John acts as the technical front line of the Google Cloud portfolio for a couple of salespeople. He helps with customer conversations about the technology and with territory management.
* This is similar to the role he had at VMware but has its differences.
* John supports two salespeople (account reps they are sometimes called) as a stateful technical resource.
* As for his customer base, he has about 15 ranging in size from startups born in the cloud to extremely large healthcare customers. All of these are in what Google classifies as the Enterprise space (again, may be defined differently than at other vendors).

4:34 – Potential Career Paths and Differences from VMware

* As John progressed at VMware he focused on excellence in Solution Engineering, but he did not take steps to setup for a career in Technical Marketing, People Management, Product Management, etc. When the opportunity came along to pursue a different role, it made sense to stay on the same path.

* The customer mix, the organization, and the products are different even though the role itself is quite similar (i.e. difference in the execution of similar tasks).

* Differences from VMware

* The Customer Engineers under John’s manager operate in a pooled model. Each person has strengths and weaknesses, and teammates can provide additional support to their peers with some additional freedom to take primary responsibilities when it makes sense.
* The set of specialists overlays (product specialists) available to engage for help is roughly the same but are specific to Google Cloud products.
* John gives examples of overlay teams for specific products such as AI, a Security Center of Excellence, G Suite, and others (recent acquisitions like Apigee).
* John has assimilated to G Suite after initially being hesitant about a move away from Office 365. He does, however, miss Visio.
* In roles like this, an Engineer is assigned from a compensation standpoint to the quota of a territory which is the same as one or more account representatives.

* The Engineer is there to act as a technical resource without regard to Sales attainment (compensated differently from a Sales rep). John shares some minor differences in percentages of variable compensation.
* Quotas at Google Cloud are very different. John’s quota is aligned with his manager’s quota (as are all members of the team), which means there is no disincentive to helping someone else on the team (no variable compensation misalignment among team members).