People-First Tech: Meet Google Cloud Engineer Lateefat

Key Takeaways

one thing that gets me super excited about this industry is that I really love solving new problems and thinking and stretching my brain around them and because the customers I work with are so varied I get to stretch Myself by thinking about problems and industries and solutions that I wouldn't have ever gotten exposure to without it my name's Latifa I'm a customer engineer here at Google cloud with a data analytics specialty and essentially what I do is help companies build apps and move them to the cloud so when I was in high school I took my first statistics course and I was never fantastic about math I was pretty good I won't sell myself short but when I got to University I added that as a degree major during that process I also was a waitress parttime in college and I realized I liked interacting with people and I also tutored and I was like I like teaching people about things especially when they didn't get it before and so customer engineering is kind of the melding of all of that I'm teaching customers about Cloud that they didn't know before I'm teaching them about their own products that they might not have known or sat down to discover but I'm also being able to implement my statistics knowledge my data analytics knowledge with people and not just behind a screen all day to build my skills the first thing I did was I took an online course and then I also got a professional data engineering certificate for Google Cloud which is where I work now as well as really just getting my hands dirty there's no other way to replace experience sometimes that's finding new projects sometimes that's volunteering for like a local community organization that needs data analytics help just anything where you can put yourself in a situation you haven't been in before by being able to show real time that I could do the work and I had experience that translated I was able to make my way in soft skills that are important for my current job are communication and by communication I mean the ability to listen to understand as well as communicate complex Concepts back to somebody as well as project management skills so think about creating a timeline helping people stick to that timeline and being able to react quickly if anything comes up if there was something I could say to anybody starting out for the first time it's okay if you don't understand things it's okay if it's confusing but now 3 years later I realized most of the problem was my inability to stop and really think about it and chew on it because I was always like raring to go and I think you guys were probably all experienced this at some point you just want to be done so fast get into your next career so fast take the opportunity to understand what's going on and then also recognize that it's okay to try something and then try something else you'll get there eventually