[funkjunky]

I worked as developer support for Google cloud (for Platinum/gold customers). I worked alongside their FTE support staff (called TSEs) and the SWEs and SREs on many GCP projects like App Engine and Spanner. I loved it, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, etc. But customer support burns you out after a while, and I figured I learned enough for a proper engineering job elsewhere, so that's what I did.

Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.

[616c]

How did you arrange getting into a gig like this? Do you cite it on your resume as a Google contractor gig? Did it help your career much?

[funkjunky]

1. I didn't arrange it, it basically landed in my lap. I was near homeless, and I was lucky that my firm found me on some job board. I think the main qualifier they wanted was somebody knew some amount of Linux and programming, who could learn anything quickly, and didn't come with too much baggage/experience of how "things should be". If you want to apply, look up (edit).

EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: [e-mail]

2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.

3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.

[bitcoinmoney]

What’s memegen?

[babaganoosh89]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/reyhan/inside-googles-i...

[funkjunky]

What they don't tell you is that it's basically the nerve center of Google's internal culture. If you ever want to find out what the latest news is, get a pulse on the current mood of googlers, or even to see if there's an outage somewhere, the quickest way was to check Memegen.