Pros
Incredibly smart, talented and diverse colleagues in the sales and sales engineering teams. This is Google, so the perks are amazing, the offices are gorgeous and the company does some incredible things across the portfolio. It is a bit like in the movie about Google, called The Internship.
Cons
Sadly, all the cool things you heard about Google do not apply to the Google Cloud organisation. A mess of mindless micromanagement, by self absorbed, arrogant, old-guard types. Everybody manages up, but does not share back down. This is easily the most old fashioned sales management team I have ever experienced. The Cloud sales and sales engineering organisations spend a ridiculous amount of time focused inward on things that reduce time with the customer, while offering no benefit to the customer. Combine that with regular fire drills, where EMEA management needs some information (without communicating why) and everyone! scrambles to provide it, with local management just passing things along, all the while pressuring you about your quota. Speaking of: If you are not in retail, don't even think about having a chance to make quota. Most enterprise customers see no reason to work with Google Cloud and even the sales engineers (CEs) haven't found a reasonable answer to the "why Google Cloud?" question that gets asked by almost every account. The new leadership under Thomas Kurian is implementing the "strategy" of throwing more sales people at the problem, and trying to play catch up on traditional workloads that make money, but where AWS and Azure are years ahead of Google. Not very creative or visionary. Publicly stating this, is even more damning. All of the DACH sales leadership comes from companies that have lost in the public cloud market (HP, Vmware, etc), but bring their mindset of traditional software sales with them. Finally there is a mix of arrogance (we are Google, we know best) and naïveté (if we build it, customers will come) that permeates the organisation. Instead of adapting industry best practices around sales processes, literally hundreds of people internally spend valuable time in creating over engineered processes for large deals that almost never materialise. It is becoming harder and harder to consult customer on GCP, because I'm starting to believe that the company will get bored of it, if it doesn't turn a profit in the next 24 months and will abandon it.
