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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud (and want to sell you cores)"

Can you share exactly what you do on GCE?

Sure.

I used to work on Compute Engine itself. I led the team that built and launched Preemptible VMs, and I still participate in its upkeep / improvements. So I generally still write little bits of code that nobody else wants to (especially monitoring and other cleanup type work).

About a year ago we started an Office of the CTO with me as the first "hire". So I transitioned from building new things and writing code much of the time (Note: Many at Google will snicker at this, as I am routinely teased for being a pseudo-PM) to talking to high-profile customers most of the time (think CTO / VP Eng types). We usually talk through where they are, what challenges they have, and whether or not GCP can actually fulfill their needs today (and as my group focuses on candor, we certainly say "You shouldn't migrate to us until we do X, Y, and Z, or you rewrite Foo").

I just hang out on HN as I like the dialogue :).

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Your role sounds similar to Cloud Solution Architect role I read about. Is there some overlap there?

There's certainly some overlap, though the Solutions Architects (SAs) are more explicitly focused on publishing solutions (cloud.google.com/solutions).

My team is composed of a mix of Google engineers that can (kind of) talk to people, and recovering CXO types from various industries (Finance, Healthcare, etc.). Each of us try to only work deeply with 1-3 customers at once, while SAs are usually focused on more broadly applicable solutions.

We all weave in and out depending on personal relationships with customers and individual skill sets, but we're all behind trying to make our customers successful regardless of role or title.

Thanks for the detailed response. It must be an interesting time right now in that group, nice to hear some insight.

I'm not trying to contradict Solomon's reply, but I lead our partner-centric solution architect team and we do send a good portion of our time in the same sort of engagements the Office of the CTO do, just in the context of three party (Google+partner+customer) opportunities. It's fun and I'm hiring (MTV, Bangalore and Paris).

>"It's fun and I'm hiring (MTV, Bangalore and Paris)."

Might you have a link for this role? Do you have a way to get in touch? I didn't see any details in your profile.

This is a general SA posting, but please email me for specifics on my openings.

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/solutions-...

I think the user (bogomipz) was looking for your email contact. Could it be eitally@google.com?

[EDIT] According to another Googler in this thread, the address is actually etally@google.com.

Thanks for the save -- I can see my email in my profile and assumed it was visible to others, too.

Thanks, cheers.

As another GCP person, I will attest that this SA team is legendary for creating valued solutions and good vibes.

The email you're looking for is etally@

I love preemptible VMs, you and your team's work has made some impressive compute projects financially feasible. :- )

You folks should really have a utility on the default images (maybe call it `seppuku` or `dienow`) which sends an "o" to /proc/sysrq-trigger; using that has allowed me to time shutdowns to within a couple seconds at worst (though there is an unfortunate discrepancy between the account logs, which show the accurate node shutdown time, and the instance logs, which only show it a few seconds later).

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