In October 2019, I left my position as a VMware Solution Engineer and joined Google Cloud as a Customer Engineer. This post is a description of the process of onboarding and my early days at Google Cloud.
Category: Career
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v2g: Moving From VMware To Google Cloud
(more…)In October 2019, after almost four years as a VMware pre-sales technical engineer, I left and found a position as a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud. I left for mostly personal reasons, and still regard my team, management, and executive leadership in a very positive light. I just needed to make a change. Doing the same job at Google Cloud has been a big change. Though there have been ups and downs, the positives far outweigh the negatives. I’d like to deliver on my promises to blog more on what I’m learning, but no promises!
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UX/Design Team at VMware is Hiring
I’ve been watching several internal programs, non-product demos, and ideas-stage discussions on design at VMware for the past few years. Just recently, I noticed that we’re in the middle of a big hiring push for the UX/Design team, so I thought I put up a couple resources for those interested in exploring that career path.
First, here’s my list of open UX/Design positions:
http://bit.ly/vmw-design2018And just as a reminder I maintain more lists of open VMware positions by type and recruitment campaigns:
/vmware-jobsNext, here’s an interview with Jehad Affoneh and Anna Marie Panlilio of the UX/Design team back in June of 2018. The spoke about their philosophy of design, how they conduct end-user research into the design process, and some ideas on the future direction of VMware product design. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the recording session, but fortunately, there’s a recording!
It was interesting to hear they’re doing NDA design sessions at VMworld. I checked and they’re almost all full. If you can sign the agreement and sign up, it would be interesting to see that information-gathering first-hand.
Also, here’s the design site they mentioned, and their design blog. If you’re interested in applying and are looking for some background on what they do and why, it’s worth a read.
VMware.design
VMware.design/research.html
VMware Design Blog on MediumOh and you might want to check out one of their public projects, the Clarity System.
Clarity Design System Training video (in a VMware Clarity YouTube Playlist):
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VMware Career Saturday 2017 Week 19
This week in VMware job listings, I’ve changed formats slightly. I dropped market segment [EDIT: and seniority or role type] as that was taking a bunch of time to generate. I managed to automate things enough to post a refreshed version of every job category I’m monitoring: SE, Sales, Consulting, and TAM in the US/Canada and EMEA. Each of those has it’s own page with it’s weekly, refreshed, complete listing. In this post, I’m going to highlight the new jobs posted in each section. Those listings are in the single digits, so I’m not going to bother having them in a table with a sort/filter function. (more…)
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VMware Career Saturday 2017 Week 18
UPDATE 2017-05-13: I’ve added individual pages (wherever my navigation currently has menu structure, currently on the left) with a weekly refreshed, complete listing of all listed positions for SEs, Sales, TAMs, and Consultants in both USA/Canada and EMEA. Those tables will have filters and sortability. My weekly posts will have new listings without the complexity of sorts and filters.
This is my weekly
Saturdayupdate of new open positions at VMware. I’m hoping this helps anyone looking to start a VMware Career! There were no new Field Sales and TAM positions posted in the US, and only a single SE and two Consulting positions posted. At readers requests, I added the listings for EMEA sales, EMEA SEs, EMEA consulting, and EMEA TAMs. I must not know anyone in Canada, LATAM, APAC, or ANZ. There’s some Bay area local positions I want to highlight and a note about what the open position on Advisory Services is all about. (more…) -
Thoughts on VMware Certification and Education
Last week, I appeared as a guest-host on Episode 386 of the VMware Communities Podcast [TalkShoe | iTunes | PlayerFM]. It’s something I hope to do on a fairly regular basis, time permitting. We had a great discussion with Karl Childs, the Senior Manager – Certification Development on the topic of the VMware certification program. We talked for an hour about the state of VMware Certification landscape. I wanted to summarize my thoughts on the conversation and write about some follow-ups I did. (more…)
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VMware Career Saturday 2017 Week 17
UPDATE 2017-05-13: I’ve added individual pages (wherever my navigation currently has menu structure, currently on the left) with a weekly refreshed, complete listing of all listed positions for SEs, Sales, TAMs, and Consultants in both USA/Canada and EMEA. Those tables will have filters and sortability. My weekly posts will have new listings without the complexity of sorts and filters.
After receiving a lot of interest last week from my previous post on open jobs at VMware, I wanted to put up an update on Field Sales and Systems Engineering positions. I shouldn’t be surprised that there were 6 new requisitions posted, more than one per work-day. VMware is increasing the size and reach of it’s sales and systems engineering force on a pretty consistent basis. I don’t know if I can keep up a weekly cadence, but I’ll try as long as there’s interest in starting a VMware career.
In addition, I got asked about asked about implementation and other post-sales positions at the company, so I’ve included those. There are two kinds of positions I’ve listed here, Consultants and Technical Account Managers. If you want to see everything that was open for Field Sales and SEs as of last week, check out last week’s post. This is only the new SE and Field Sales jobs. As always, you can head to VMware’s recruiting site at Rolepoint and conduct your own searches. I’m watching the “United States” as a location and four types of positions: “Sales-Field Sales“, “Sales-Systems Engineering“, “Services and Consulting-Consulting“, and “Services and Consulting-Technical Account Management“.
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Jobs at VMware Sales/SE Saturday
UPDATE 2017-05-13: I’ve added individual pages (wherever my navigation currently has menu structure, currently on the left) with a weekly refreshed, complete listing of all listed positions for SEs, Sales, TAMs, and Consultants in both USA/Canada and EMEA. Those tables will have filters and sortability. My weekly posts will have new listings without the complexity of sorts and filters.
UPDATE 2017-04-29: I’ve got a new post with the newly posted jobs as of April 29th, 2017 (2017, week 17) here. In that post, I’ve included new SE and Field Sales jobs as well as post-sales jobs in the Consulting and Technical Account Management categories.
I’ve been tracking open jobs at VMware in enough areas for enough people that I decided to put up my findings for other people to search. Of course, you can head to VMware’s recruiting site at Rolepoint and slice and dice searches on your own. I’m watching the “United States” as a location and two types of positions, 38 in “Sales-Field Sales” and 41 in “Sales-Systems Engineering“.
One area that I haven’t had good luck in organizing for content is on the software development side. There are currently 130 open software engineering jobs at VMware (in the US) which doesn’t seem like a large data set to organize, but the question is how. For the Network and Security Business Unit, previous experience with network stacks is a constant theme. However, some specialties don’t sort that way (UX design, for example). Sorting by languages and tools doesn’t seem like a good idea, though an anlysis of what’s being used by Business Unit might be a separate, interesting task. At any rate, if you’re looking for a software development position at VMware, head to the recruiting site and choose “Engineering and Technology-Software Engineering” from the department drop-down.
Regardless of the type of role you’re looking for, I’m happy to chat about my understanding of the job roles and team structures, eyeball a resume for format and impact, and chat about what it’s like to work at VMware. I’m including a contact form at the bottom if you’d like to get in touch with me. And of course, I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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VMware 2016 – Another Job Change
Well, it’s happened again. I wasn’t looking to make a job change, but an opportunity I couldn’t turn down found me. In November 2015, I joined VMware’s San Francisco Bay Area Enterprise Systems Engineering team.My previous role had me educating solution providers on the VMware software portfolio as well as teaching partner Systems Engineers about pre-sales systems engineering for their customers. I now find myself working for VMware directly as a Systems Engineer, assigned to cover a group of Enterprise level named accounts. My fiancée and I moved from Southern California to the Bay Area for me to take this job. An upheaval (and a risk!), but also an amazing opportunity to work directly for one of the most innovative and disruptive software companies around.
What does that mean for my writing? Well, I pretty much fell on my face when it came to maintaining a regular cadence during my time in the distribution channel. I’m going to try my best to do better now. There’s certainly a different emphasis within the portfolio for enterprise customers. Hopefully I can provide insight into the solutions engineering process from the inside.
Some things you probably won’t see from me:
- Product speculation; Even with limited insider knowledge, this seems inappropriate.
- Competitor bashing
- Customer information; Maybe it goes without saying, but I’ll have to generalize my lessons learned.
Things I’ll try to add to the topic list:
- Career advice that I’m finding helpful
- Industry news that I’m finding relevant and impactful
- Products I’m discovering within the portfolio
So thanks to anyone who’s found my writing useful so far. If there’s anything you’d like to see my thoughts on, please ask away!