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Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So that's a weird feeling.
One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to both real users and unique environments is important for their growth and novelty in the job.
If you're working in SaaS or commodity products and have to run POCs a lot, you're totally correct.
There are people willing to pay for convenience AND security at the same time (hire someone else to manage the problem, and they're the 'key').
My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now running a solo consulting business.
I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding different/better ways to communicate.
In what industries did these roles happen? Same industry/domain or have you changed that as well?
I love talking too, part of why I think pre-sales is a lot of fun. And I actually love my CRM work from a data perspective, but my background is in synthesizing data and optimization. Once I turned my sales process into a network optimizing problem, it became extremely interesting to me and imperative to keep the data current.
Did you always enjoy talking or did you discover it at some point prior to your current sales role?
Now they are working on continuous learning so that they can roll out new model (it is a very adversarial line of business and the models get stale in O(hours)). For that part I only helped them design the thing, no hands on. It was a super fun engagement TBH
This isn’t “DevOps”. This is “IT Support”.
But honestly, if you aren’t embedded into a team where developers and infrastructure folks are working together - you aren’t doing anything differently than old school operations people did 25 years ago
This is not devops, this is someone managing yaml to allow an org to avoid doing devops.
Devops is practiced by everyone. If there are people asking the same questions over and over there is a feedback loop / education / automation problem and THAT is the part that makes a job devops.
I moved into another support role sort of by accident when I really wanted a sysadmin job but didn't have the years of experience needed to get through the door. I found out (again, by accident) that engaging with our customers directly gave me the feedback and sense of accomplishment that I was missing. I now know that it's an essential component for me. I'm much happier having figured that out.
I genuinely throught this was impossible for a very long time. In my SWE roles I’ve mostly felt disconnected and isolated.
I resigned from my last dev job and started working in donut and coffee shops. I loved it.
I’m pursuing Support Engineer roles now hoping it will provide the human focus that was missing prior.
The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.
Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!
I am post sales, billable staff consultant who leads projects. I’m “delivery”. I focus on one project at a time and dig deep into requirements and the implementation and/or strategy docs.
- support engineer
- solutions engineer
- sales engineer
- applied engineer
- forward deployed engineer
- solutions / sales architect
- field engineer
And that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to deploy, etc. but deals with clients.
I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those roles if you're wanting a role focused almost entirely on post-sales.
(I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the director of research at his company and has had to wear a "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)
ProServe consultants (full time employees) are never called SAs
I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/120-skills-i-use-in-an-sre-pl.... I do agree, it is fun to mix it up in your day to day (IMO).
This is very, very wrong. Why do you think that?
It requires a more holistic, generalist view, and a degree of customer understanding, empathy, management and conversational skills well beyond typical devops.
If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real" engineers.
As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo kinda works during the call, you're 10/10.
At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a level above your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers, you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.
Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team, and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference thing.
Being a solutions engineer at the right companies means you get to be one of the few people with full end-to-end visibility of the entire lifecycle of both a client and the technology adoption, deployment, optimization, maintenance, etc. process. And you'll get to see it dozens or hundreds of times for a variety of clients across industries. Again though, totally depends on the company.
Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain.
Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain.
Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain!
The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control.
However, I think the author and I have different opinions on what DevOps is. DevOps isn't a full time role. It's what the engineer does to get their software into production.
I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps).
DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized.
In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it.
Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like:
if (should_never_happen) {
log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again");
}
IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.
Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals.
Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?
Great if billing by the hour, and mostly unsustainable for products =3