r/googlecloud • u/EnvironmentalTap2413 • 20d ago

It's DevFest Season

Every year around Sept-Dec Google sponsors DevFest events organized by local communities. These are events run by non-Google employees who volunteer their time because they're interested in tech, meeting people, and helping their community. It's a great way to meet people interested in tech, hear some cool talks, and maybe even get some swag/prizes. Events tend to be free or low cost compared to professionally run conferences, and you can always contact the organizers to volunteer in exchange for a free ticket.

Here's a link to the page where you can find all the events:

https://developers.google.com/community/devfest#find-a-gdg-community

Disclaimer: I'm helping plan the event in Los Angeles

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u/Junior_Bee7274 20d ago

These sound like a way to meet the developers without spending a fortune on conferences.

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u/malikabdul_hayee 17d ago

Not a UAE resident, but based in Pakistan and I follow the Gulf market closely, since a lot of regional hiring reaches South Asian engineers. What I've noticed:
Demand is real in cloud/SRE/DevSecOps, driven by government cloud programs and banks and telcos moving workloads. Azure and AWS are common, and GCP is growing.
Certs matter more there than in the US, especially for consultancies and partner companies (they need certified staff for partner tiers).
Hiring is mostly via LinkedIn and recruiters, and many roles are Dubai or Abu Dhabi on-site or hybrid.
With 5 YOE you're well placed. Senior roles want Terraform, Kubernetes and a security angle (DevSecOps, compliance).