Pros
I was a TSE at GCP. I have listed the pros and cons of the role below. As you can see, the cons outweigh the pros, which is why I left for a different role within Google. 1. Great way to get your foot in the door in Google. The interview process is relatively easy (compared to SWE) and they are hiring at a fast pace. (UPDATE - Recently there has been news that they are limiting hiring in the USA and have even let go of some employees) 2. Great way to learn how a growing Cloud enterprise operates. 3. Get the Google brand on your work experience.
Cons
1. Not really a technical role. You basically resolve customer issues. There is almost no coding. This is great for people who are not technically inclined but still want to get paid well for support work. But it drained me as I did not feel challenged and had nothing to actually learn as I believe that the only way to learn is to implement things. I am surprised by how many of my fellow TSEs (with MS degrees) were OK with this sort of work. 2. No opportunities to learn and grow by building a project from scratch. This may seem like a copy of the first point but it's not. Before joining Google Cloud, I had 4 years of experience as a Software Engineer and a Data Engineer at multiple companies. In all of them, you either had a new or relatively-new project that you got assigned to and you contributed to its development. Watching your project grow and get to production is an important part of being an engineer and why I love my line of work. But this is not possible when you are flooded with cases that you need to resolve. Google does allow 20% of your time to work on projects outside of your work, but unless you come up with an idea to benefit your own sub-organization (i.e. Cloud Support), you cannot really include that work in your year-end performance review. I am observing a pattern where GCP is focussing more on hiring interns straight out of college. The good thing is that it prevents them from hiring experienced over-qualified engineers for support work. The bad thing is that many new engineering graduates will accept the fact that solving customer cases is true engineering work and will never venture outside of this proverbial well. 3. Lot of churn in employees. Based on the above 2 points, employees are dissatisfied. I have seen quite a few people either leave Google or move to a different role after less than 2 years. This reinforces my belief that I am not the only one who feels the same way about this role. This is even true even for senior leadership. During my time working there, I saw a lot of changes in the leadership structure. 4. Customers are not the most patient people in the world. This is especially true when they are facing an issue and they have asked you to resolve it. I had a particularly bad experience when on a customer call, the customer talked to me like I was a waiter who had made a mistake with his order. Not all customers are like this, but it takes only one to make you rethink your career choices.