Customer engineers bring people and technology together

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating Women’s History Month by talking with Cloud Googlers about identity and how it influences their work in technology. 

At Google Cloud, our customer engineers bring technology and people together, helping our customers choose the right tools to solve their problems, and create the solutions that will help them keep growing. We talked to a few customer engineers about their path to customer engineering, their technology passions, and what advice they offer to other women in technology.

“If I Only Had a Heart”: Being human in tech beats out a brains-only approach

Kristin Aliberto, Customer Engineer

I was lucky to study computer science in high school; I came of age at a time people were loudly claiming there wouldn’t be any tech jobs in the U.S. Undergrad saw me following my passion for history and teaching instead. But after finishing my degree at Temple University, I ran IT support for our Student Center and became fascinated with end user technology. Again, I was lucky: our school was an early adopter of Google Apps for Education. 

That was my first interaction with the cloud, and led to my first big tech job—working as the support lead for New York University’s Google Apps project.

Technology as a language for solving problems. My social sciences background comes to the forefront when I’m considering data. Accepting quantitative metrics without question often leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what those metrics actually represent. By extension, how you solve the related problems is impacted. 

Similarly, when I hear technology requirements from a customer, they are often focused on the “how.” What I want to know is “why.” Once we have the “why”, we can partner with our customer to identify the “what” - the solution - along with the “how”. 

Even if Google Cloud doesn’t have a “how” for the customer today, by working in partnership with the customer on the “what” and more importantly, the “why”, we provide a valuable service. 

By joining Google, I have been able to explore many different kinds of customer problems. I can get hands-on with cool technology, and use it to solve intricate challenges both on the job - and outside of it. I dabble in new technologies whenever I can. My latest homebrew experiment was building a Kubernetes cluster from retired Chromeboxes. As a female rugby coach, I’m often frustrated by standard machine learning around sports video analysis, because models are usually trained for male bodies. I’ve made experimenting with that a priority, to help myself, my players and women’s athletics - a subject I have a deep passion for. 

My advice to other women is simple: know your value. 

Cultivate an awareness of what your value is. Surround yourself with women who will both challenge and support you. Understand that the field you play on was not set by you, but don’t let it stop you. Don’t be ashamed to play the game as the current rules dictate, and never miss an opportunity to challenge those rules. 

Level the playing field for those who come after. 

Connecting customers with technology

Roshni Joshi, Director, Customer Engineering

Growing up in India, I had great role models surrounding me - my mom is an anesthesiologist and lots of my aunts’ have advanced degrees in sciences and followed professional careers as professors and teachers. My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering, but after my first internship, I realized it wasn’t my thing. I needed a profession where I could interact more with people. I switched my focus to get a graduate degree in Computer Science—which was quite the journey, since I had limited programming experience when I started! I worked first as an SAP consultant, then moved into program management and practice management and then presales.

My biggest draw to Google is our culture and our commitment to open source technologies —it’s a point of pride for us that we don’t lock users in. Many of today’s hyperscale apps supporting the digital economy were open sourced at Google—like Chromium, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Sharing those capabilities with our enterprise customers, and helping apply them to their problems, is really exciting. I love understanding “the why” and solving for it with “the what”. Right now though, in the current time, being a part of this company, and seeing our response to the coronavirus crisis, through our people, resources and technology is humbling and inspiring - I am so proud to wear the Google badge every day, but especially now.

It’s easy to be a victim of impostor syndrome and self-doubt or think you’re not qualified to be in a certain role or field—I see this a lot in women, and I experience it myself. I tell women newer to the workforce to hold their impostor syndrome in healthy balance with their confidence - be honest about your strengths and weaknesses. If you want something, pursue it and pursue it with passion. Apply for that job opening, make that career change or ask for a raise. No one else will ask for you. You have to do it yourself. The worst that can happen is you face a no. 

Also, remember, what will push you furthest in your career is grit and tenacity. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just remember the importance of doing small things better every day. If you keep getting small wins in inches, over time, they add up to a mile.

Bringing scientific rigor to cloud problems

Vanessa July, Customer Engineer

I studied chemistry and nanotechnology and spent my undergraduate years doing lab work. Once I got out of college, I didn’t really want to pursue a PhD or a post-doc and I had a mentor who worked in technology. He recommended that I apply to HPE’s tech boot camp for recent grads, and through his sponsorship, I started my tech career at HPE in Sales Engineering. Shortly after joining Google Cloud, I got the chance to work on the Higher Education team, and working with researchers really reignited my love of science. I realized that though I didn’t want to do lab work as a career, I could still work closely with scientists and help facilitate their work with cloud computing.

I always tell people that you don’t have to have studied computer science or coding to work in technology. In fact, the scientific method I learned in my undergrad years has served me in every other part of my life. Science involves asking unknown questions, creating a hypothesis, and designing an experiment to test it. It requires you to find data to support or reject that hypothesis. That’s what I do now—figuring out the unknowns and building a framework to solve for them. Because solving customer problems looks different every time, it’s important to keep the number of variables as few as possible for consistency, then re-asses and adjust as needed. For example, to scale a computing environment, you may not know at the onset what you’ll uncover as you add more cores and resources, so you need to be able to test intelligently and have a backup plan. 

I’m stubborn, so I advise those newer to the workforce to have some tenacity. Ultimately, you have to ask for what you want. Know your expectations and be comfortable communicating them - especially to mentors or sponsors who can help you. My mentor knew I was smart enough to learn about technology on the job, and his sponsorship took me into that first job. If someone is willing to advocate for you, then let them know what you want - whether that’s a promotion, a raise, or another goal. Create a clear understanding for those helpers so they are able to lift you up.