Forrest Brazeal, Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how AI, current job markets, and more are impacting software engineers. Forrest and Corey explore whether AI helps or hurts developers, and what impact it has on the role of a junior developer and the rest of the development team. Forrest also shares his viewpoints on how he feels AI affects people in creative roles. Corey and Forrest discuss the pitfalls of a long career as a software developer, and how people can break into a career in cloud as well as the necessary pivots you may need to make along the way. Forrest then describes why he feels workers are currently staying put where they work, and how he predicts a major shift will happen when the markets shift.About ForrestForrest is a cloud educator, cartoonist, author, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He currently leads the content marketing team at Google Cloud. You can buy his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, from Wiley Publishing or attend his talks at public and private events around the world.Links Referenced:
Personal Website: https://goodtechthings.com

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TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn and I am thrilled to have a returning guest on, who has been some would almost say suspiciously quiet over the past year or so. Forrest Brazeal is the Head of Developer Media over at Google Cloud, and everyone sort of sits there and cocks their head, like, “What does that mean?” And then he says, “Oh, I’m the cloud bard.” And everyone’s, “Oh, right. Get it: the song guy.” Forrest, welcome back.Forrest: Thanks, Corey. As always, it’s great to be here.Corey: So, what have you been up to over the past, oh let’s call it, I don’t know, a year, since I think, is probably the last time you’re on the show.Forrest: Well, gosh, I mean, for one thing, it seems like I can’t call myself the cloud bard anymore because Google rolled out this thing called Bard and I’ve started to get some DMs from people asking for, you know, tech support on Bard. So, I need to make that a little bit clearer that I do not work on Bard. I am a lowercase bard, but I was here first, so if anything, you know, Google has deprecated me.Corey: Honestly, this feels on some level like it’s more cloudy if we define cloudy as what, you know, Amazon does because they launched a quantum computing service about six months after they launched some unrelated nonsense that they called [QuantumDB 00:01:44], which you’d think if you’re launching quantum stuff, you’d reserve the word quantum for that. But no, they’re going to launch things that stomp all over other service names as well internally, so customers just wind up remarkably confused. So, if you find a good name, just we’re going to slap it on everything, seems to be the way of cloud.Forrest: Yeah, naming things has proven to be harder than either quantum computing or generative AI at this point, I think.Corey: And in fairness, I will point out that naming things is super hard; making fun of names is not. So, that is—everyone’s like, “Wow, you’re so good at making fun of names. Can you name something well?” [laugh]. Absolutely not.Forrest: Yeah, well, one of the things you know, that I have been up to over the past year or so is just, you know, getting to learn more about what it’s like to have an impact in a very, very large organizational context, right? I mean, I’ve worked in large companies before, but Google is a different size and scale of things and it takes some time honestly, to, you know, figure out how