Now I will hand it over to Jia-Ren for
the Q&A Session.
Thanks, Mark, for the introduction.
Now you probably
have some more time to
scan the QR Codes here,
or you can take photo or write down these two email addresses.
If you have any questions related
to the job or to the Cloud Support Engineers,
you can raise your questions.
I will first go through some of the
questions we gathered in advance.
I will answer them for you.
The first one is about work description and environment.
Here I can quickly tell you about what
our daily life is like here.
For a Cloud Support Engineer, as the name suggests,
the most important task is to solve the issues for the clients.
So when the client submits a case,
we will help them solve it.
So you can imagine it like,
after starting working here, you’ll solve the issues for the clients.
But unlike the machine, you don’t
need to work 8 or 9 hours straight,
handling one issue after another,
without any breaks.
When you receive a case,
if you need in-depth research,
you can go ahead and do it in the lab.
You make your own decisions.
Nobody will be there to keep tabs
on you and ask how you are
progressing with a project or
when you will finish it.
Nobody will track you like that.
You must complete it on your own.
And in what kind of situation
can we possibly switch your case?
It could happen that
a client wants to escalate a case,
and it becomes very urgent
due to the production needs.
and compared with the case
that you are handling,
the other case is just about general guidance, so
perhaps we can just switch them.
So this could happen.
Besides handling cases,
there is also sharing.
You can also share your
specialties with other people.
In addition to sharing, there is also Customer Engagement.
Before the pandemic,
we had the opportunity to visit client sites.
But after the pandemic, now we are doing
everything remotely.
So the clients often want to find out about
the services, asking about any traps, any points, or any
settings that we need to be aware
of because the service is newer.
This is when we become useful.
As we solve client issues every day,
we have a lot of knowledge about this service.
So we know what issues
usually occur to the clients.
At this point you might work with our other roles, such as
Sales, SA, or Technical Account Manager.
They will ask you to prepare some materials
to share with the clients.
So that’s Customer Engagement.
So in addition to solving cases
in your daily life,
you may also have many other events in
your daily life at work.
So this is basically what we do for work every day.
And the environment is actually,
I think it’s pretty good.
Compared with the office where we used to work,
the office here is very beautiful.
They’ve got coffee and other basic supplies.
And as we’re located in Xinyi District in Taipei,
the view is pretty good here.
So I think the work environment is pretty nice and comfy.
And the company culture is
just like what I said earlier.
It’s pretty open.
Nobody will keep an eye on you. You need to be really
good at self-control. It’s pretty flexible. You need to
manage everything on your own.
So this is basically our
work and environment.
And
there are people asking whether we
have specific degree requirements for our positions.
So I am going to tell you about it.
You must have seen that our
job description has lots of requirements in it.
Just like everyone, when I saw the job description before,
I didn’t think it was possible, and that I was not that good.
But actually you only need to look at the items in the job
description that match your
specialties and your skills.
You focus on these ones.
Don’t be afraid and submit your application.
After all, we will definitely
review the resumes, we’ll have phone screenings,
and we have interviews.
We go through one step at a time.
So actually,
even though we have technology limitations and skill requirements,
as long as you see something in the job description
that matches your own skills, and
you are very confident in them,
it’s ok to submit your application,
and you just go ahead and apply.
We’re not gonna be like,
you’re from Business Management,
so you can’t apply here.
On the contrary, we have many
people without CS background.
I remember we have
people that studied materials
science in school, and
also people in psychology, and other disciplines.
But eventually we focus on your skills.
As long as you are very
familiar with a specific domain,
such as the Big Data domain, or
if you are a Linux expert,
it’s all good.
They are all just descriptions, on Job Description.
You can all submit your application.
And what are
the required skills if you want to apply for a Cloud Support Engineer?
We talked about many different
profiles in one slide earlier.
So if you are good at MySQL,
you can apply for a
profile under Database.
We don’t have skills requirement.
You need to go to the profile, and
look at the job description to see
if you have anything that matches,
then you submit your application.
And
the last one,
the last question is,
how do we provide training?
People will receive 3-4 months of
training when they start working.
So you don’t need to worry that
you’ll be sent to face the client
as soon as you join us. No.
We’ve set up a series of New Hire Training, and we
have many online courses.
People will have time to learn.
We also assign mentors to you.
We value these aspects very much.
In addition to online learning,
a lot of our New Hire Training takes place face to face.
So it’s not like you have to watch videos all day.
Other than these, we also have
many internal resources and
many internal training videos
that are available for everyone.
And other than these, you can also discuss with
and learn from other colleagues, like the local ones in Taipei,
or the ones in Dublin, Seattle, or
Cape Town, and many other sites.
If you speak Japanese, you can
even discuss with the colleagues
in Japan and learn from them. So,
these are the questions
we collected before the Webinar.
Now let’s look at some of
the questions raised online.
Let me see
if I can answer some of them now.
Ok, someone asked,
“if I am still studying for a PhD, can I send my resume?”
For this situation, you can in fact talk to our recruiter, and they can
probably make arrangement for you.
You see on the screen
we have two emails. You can send your
questions to these emails.
There is also someone asking whether
the number of cases means our work performance.
It certainly is.
Let’s
take developer for example.
A developer definitely has a basic KPI, and it is
based on projects.
A Cloud Support Engineer certainly
needs to solve client issues.
But you don’t need to worry
the goal would be like you
have to solve 100 cases per month, like a machine.
That will not happen. The goal we set is not like
something you need to work all day
and all night just to reach it.
It’s actually, personally, based on my personal experience,
I never cared about the goal much,
because it was achieved naturally.
You get online and solve 2 cases every day, and
you can achieve your monthly goal.
The goal is not the point for me.
The important thing for me is that
when I handle and solve
different cases for the clients
every day, I will feel a sense of achievement, and
it is also very interesting.
Maybe out of all of the cases you handle,
20% or 30% are repeated.
As they are repeated, you know how to solve them,
so it’s quick to handle these.
But the other 70%-80% are different
with different scenarios, settings,
and client environments,
so they are very challenging.
So I used to think that time
flew by quickly every day.
It’s a good think that time flies.
It means your time is well spent,
and you are very concentrated in the things you do.
So I think this is a good thing.
The cases will surely be your goal,
but I don’t think this goal will create too much pressure for you.
At least I think the engineer colleagues can usually
find their own balance.
They will not feel they are
being pressured by a goal, and
have to work extremely hard for it.
This would be too exhausting.
Ok, good.
Some people asked that
since we are customer centric,
do we need to have sales expertise?
What you mean is probably the soft skills.
So actually, I think that
what’s special about a Cloud Support Engineer is that,
in addition to the technical skills,
we also focus on the communication skills.
But you don’t have to worry. We don’t expect you to be
like a sales agent, or talk eloquently like a SA.
All you need is to talk clearly and logically to let the clients
understand the issues.
Or you need to be calm, logical,
and well-organized when you are handling
communications and coordination. That’s enough.
We don’t need you to be very eloquent so that
you can do this job. That’s impossible.
The technical skills are still more important.
And the soft skills,
though equally important,
are still not as highly valued as technical skills.
We expect you to only have some basic communication skills,
because there are things
that you will never know without facing the clients first.
And you will learn from it, and
your skills will grow and change.
So your skills and communication skills
will get better and better.
Ok.
Many people asked,
can new graduates apply?
Is it suitable for new graduates?
We actually have many successful
cases with new graduates, people that just finished university.
So when you were in school, you would definitely learn
something like
networking, which is covered in Introduction to Computer Science.
So you must have some ideas about networking.
It can serve as your basic skills.
Or maybe you had a part-time job
in school or helped the lab maintain your environment, so you
know the Linux admin very well.
These are something you can use.
Or maybe when you had a project back in university,
you must know that domain well.
You can see if they
match any of the items in the job description and
then use them for the application.
If you know distributed computing,
then you’re a good fit for Big Data.
Even if you don’t know Hadoop, with
knowledge in distributed computing,
you can learn and master our
services very quickly.
So it doesn’t mean
you have to learn MySQL, or
Hadoop, or
networking in school,
or you have to be good at it. No, not at all.
So I suggest that you don’t put so many restrictions on yourself.
Instead, you should take
a look at yourself, and
try to find out what skills you have now, and
see which roles can best match the skills that you have,
and then you can file applications. Just like that.
If you don’t match anything, or more improvement is needed,
then you can prepare for the future.
As our team keeps growing,
there will always be opportunities.
If you don’t speak English well,
well, for English proficiency, I am not saying that you have to
get very high scores in TOEIC or TOEFL, or that
you need to speak it very well and fluently, etc.
To get back to what I just said,
it’s Amazon and AWS
and it’s a foreign company,
it’s true we have people that
speak Chinese, but most of our colleagues are people
from other foreign sites and from other countries.
If you want to have a career here,
I’d say that English is really important.
Even if you don’t come work for us,
I believe English is equally important in other companies.
With good English proficiency,
you can be friends with people from other sites, and
you can ask questions easily, and discuss things with more people.
During the process of handling a case,
you might open an Internal Ticket and send it
to the Service Team, to the Development Team.
You might have meetings and calls with them.
You can’t join the meeting and say,
“I am sorry, but I don’t understand what you say,”
or other people don’t understand what I say. You won’t be able
to solve client issues like this.
We’re not asking people to speak English perfectly.
But at least you need to be able to handle basic communications.
If you can do basic communications,
you can learn more on the job.
Many colleagues have improved
their English after working here.
There are many incentives here that
make you do more self-learning,
to improve yourself.
So please don’t think that you cannot apply simply because
you don’t speak English well. As long as you think you have
some basic English reading or
writing skills, and you
can also communicate in English,
there shouldn’t be any problems.
In addition, many of our internal trainings, and
many of our materials are in English.
So
if you have sufficient proficiency in reading or speaking English,
it will be helpful when you read internal documents.
As for certifications, I think
different interviewers have
different views on certification.
But I also think that a certification is like
a recognition that you
have a certain basic skill.
But then,
it’s just like a threshold.
We still need to see how you
present yourself and show that you have this specialty, right?
For example, let’s say you are interviewing for our SA Associate.
Perhaps you have some knowledge of our basic services, and this
knowledge can be shown in the phone
screen and technical interviews, for us to see whether you have
basic understanding of basic things like S3, EC2,
or VPC and other basic things.
So it doesn’t mean that you’ll get 50 extra points
if you have a certification. It’s not like that.
It’ll depend on how you perform during the interview.
Is graduate school necessary?
I don’t think it is necessary, but
it still goes back to the skills that we talked about.
We want to know what your skills
can contribute to this position.
So I think you can all just
send your resume to us, or
send your questions to these
two emails for more discussions.
Ok.
What are other questions?
There are some questions that are
not suitable for discussion here.
Please send an email to our
recruiter for discussions.
I’ll only help with those
I am able to answer right now.
What we are looking for here,
in general,
we’re looking for full-time
Cloud Support Engineers based
in Taipei and Dublin.
Of course we have other roles
and positions in other countries.
You can apply for
those ones on Amazon Job.
They will let you know about the subsequent steps.
Now we’re just targeting the vacancies in these three locations.
Someone asked an interesting question about
the internship details.
For internship, you can just
talk to your manager to decide on
your working days and your working hours.
It’s very flexible.
Like how many days you need
to work per week and per month.
We don’t really set a hard limit for that.
You can just have an
open discussion with your manager to decide on that.
As for the interview, it’s just like what we said.
We will definitely have a phone screening.
After the phone screening,
namely resume phone screening,
we will have loop interviews.
You can probably find out about
loop interviews on the Internet.
We have probably about at least
4 to 5, or maybe 3 to 5 interviews.
So there will definitely be more than one interview.
And there should be at least
3 or 4 interviews.
As for salary, it’s
not suitable for discussion here.
I think I’ve responded to
all the other questions.
So I think that
perhaps let’s wrap it up. It’s almost 4:55.
So if you have questions about the
roles, salaries and other topics,
send them to these two emails.
They will answer your questions.
So that’s all for our sharing today.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Mark.
Thank you, everyone.