Tech Careers
A year (and some more time) at Google
Arpana put togethers her favourite moments at work from the past year as a customer engineer fresh out of college.
6 months ago, I wrote my first technical blog post. It is something I wanted to do for a long, long time but always lacked the confidence but.. now, here you are, on my blog, reading something written (and published online!) by yours truly.
Writing online can sometimes seem like throwing your message in an ocean but Google search taught me No! And so did my manager and team lead, and I can never be thankful enough to both of you.
Well, this year has been about trying out a lot of new things and I decided to put this together in the best way I know, by writing about it. This is more a memoir for me (and not a tech blog post), and a lot of gratitude spilling out time and now. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Before we rewind to Feb 2021, I am going to say something you have already heard a million times — That thing you have been planning to do for a long time but putting off because you are not ready? Do it. The job opening you think you will apply to after doing 150 Leetcode problems, the friend you’ve been meaning to call, the course you have kept on hold for months now, do it. And if you cannot complete it today, at least begin somewhere.
Not able to call that friend? Leave a text. :)
I joined Google on February 1st, 2021. I had been working at Codingal, an ed-tech startup based in Bengaluru for about 7 months as a developer on contract, had my farewell there on Jan 28th, and so I was also a little sad about having left my first team out of college (and an absolutely lovely one that!). I was wondering if not taking a break before my joining was a good idea or not, but living in the pandemic we are, my corp laptop arrived a week later due to logistic issues. So yes, I got the break. Going with the flow sometimes?
February 2021
Day 1 Week 1 saw a 10 am meeting. Huge transition for somebody who was doing after-dinner debugging sessions just a week ago. Thankfully the excitement/first-day-fears/the-fear-of-unknown kept me up! :D
My fav memory from feb is my birthday which was just about a week later. My corp laptop had just arrived — a little late but sitting on my desk were flowers perfectly timed and a celebration disguised in a ‘quick-sync’ meeting. I was on cloud nine! People who know me are guessing I was all teary, and yes you are right.
Despite the remote onboarding and all the confusion of being in a new situation, February was a very warm welcome. ❤
March 2021
This month was about ramping up as a GCP Googler — exploring products on the cloud, going through documentation, running small POCs for myself to get hands-on with the most commonly used solutions, and meeting a lot of people 1:1. (in rectangular screens though but still realize how kind everybody is.)
And then I got my first GCP certification — Associate Cloud Engineer and again, sitting on my desk were flowers. 🥺
Needless to say, I was very happy, but my mother was more.
April 2021
April had a cool microphone, a webcam, and a Google Cloud T-shirt (my first till then!) delivered at home. I did my first ever webinar and spoke about how serverless technology can reduce your time to market and operational overhead.
It was such a great time working on the content for it, doing dry runs with the marketing team, getting feedback, and learning about presenting online.
My mother keeps all her very precious crockery packed, and after the event suggested that we pack the mic and place it on a shelf.
May 2021
I have always wanted to share what I learn and I am grateful for the people who trust on me to teach them something. In May I got this amazing opportunity to be a part of Jumpstart — a 6 week certification program for Google Cloud Customers to get ACE certified. Having completed my ACE cert very recently it was timed perfectly. I demoed in front of a live audience — 100+ people! Let us now take a minute to thank the demo gods for being in my favour (except for one small glitch which I was able to handle)
The demos, the glitch, the audience — everything feels great now. Now.
June 2021
I won’t talk a lot about this month, but in short it is my favorite. ❤️
It is in June I figured out the internal process to write for GCP community and wrote my first ever tech blog. Special shoutout to Nikhila and Rishi!
July 2021
Googlers joining in the pandemic only saw pictures of cool offsites of their peers in 100 different places, and offsite for us meant —
But then I, with my colleague Jolene, thought we should make this something fun! That was the goal, just fun. :D (and getting a budget for a lot of swag — hope Dav is not reading this)
We organised a 4 day offsite which is called the coolest remote offsite ever!
Anyway truth be spoken, I am desperately waiting for a real offsite. 🥺
Right after the offsite I took a tech writing course and wrote another blog — the learnings of which came from working with customers.
By this month I was solving and designing for customers on my own and trying to feel like I am ‘architecting’ these solutions for real. I would sometimes not look at the internal resources first and hop around youtube and the product documentations to test myself and see if I could think without looking at a solution. The validation came with my 2nd cert — Professional Cloud Architect.
Definitely so much more to learn but this milestone held huge importance to me as I had failed my first attempt to it and prepared for the new exam with resources spread across the internet. Worth it :)
August 2021
My team had been really kind and after having figured out the process internally to publish for GCP medium community, and written a few blogs — they asked me to share the learnings with them. I did a tech blogging session attended by 30+ people.
I peer reviewed blogs for the CE interns batch ’21 (the first!), and it was an out of the world feeling to see their blogs published and appreciated!
August was also when I wrote my first performance review doc. (I started to!)
September 2021
And it took me two weeks to finish and finalise that doc — that with the help with our team lead who spent days editing the doc with us — Phew. When I had first started to write it I thought I did not work on anything meaningful at all, but I have realised it is easy to forget things over months.
✅ Now, I keep a running doc which I update monthly to not miss on anything of ‘impact’.
Anyhoo, In September we welcomed the second cohort of grad CEs and were assigned as ‘buddies’ to them! I call this experience ‘cute’ in my head. We kicked off a study group for their certification prep, something which was done for us when we had joined!
And I packed.
October 2021
To move to Bangalore! 👩🏻💻
Bangalore week 1 was greaaat. Luckily, covid numbers were dropping and it was during this time we were allowed a few get togethers in office — with a lot of permissions — but I met a few people from my team in-person in office the same week I came here!
October is also when our performance reviews are released. I was too scared, almost like a parent-teacher meeting day in school. I don’t know what I was expecting but it was such a happy talk with my manager, us going over our notes and discussing plans moving forward! Yayy 🙈
November 2021
It takes a cool team to have an Oscar’s of their own! 🪄
And it is cooler to get an award at one :P
However this sounds to you, it was super duper amazing for somebody seeing that for the FIRST time. It wasn’t a formality! We had cool hosts, goofy scripts prepared (yes! PREPARATION!) and so much fun dressing up with a theme! I got the Diwali award, and I really did not have a speech ready. 😂
In November, I also co-presented Google Cloud Operations suite to an audience of 150+ people as part of Jumpstart. You can catch the recording here.
December 2021
By December I was meeting a lot of customers every week (online), felt confident about some pillars in GCP and was able to fix and find solutions for even advanced use cases.
I shared my learnings on Cloud with the batch of Nooglers across APAC in a Cloud Orientation session and it felt nice being able to answer their questions (like yes, things really have progressed for me in some way!)
Oh, and I went to office quite a few times. Checking the breakfast menu a day before is always a good motivation to wake up early.
2022 (January to now!)
I started the year with Professional DevOps certification (4x certified now), and joined the team I was supposed to graduate to. A little earlier than the planned timeline!
A new team, newer customers, newer challenges! If there was one thing constant across these months then it was ‘Kubernetes’. Everybody in my family is very familiar with this term now. :)
I have also met customer teams in person now, travelled for meetings.. And yes, I got promoted! 🤗
Over the past year I have learnt that there is something everybody can teach you. Helping somebody can be helpful to your own self too. Sometimes you are looking for mentors, sometimes mentors find you because they want to see you grow. Don’t shy away from bringing your authentic self!
If it was real life I could just stop mid sentence and look at you to conclude the monologue, but I hope you can sense we are at an end now. Hope you have a good day, especially since you read until this point :)
Otherwise too. :P
Thoughts? I tweet at @arpana_naa. 🐦
