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Comment by peterst28 | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty you can do, but you have to figure out what appeals to you, the tradeoffs, path, etc. I found that the book "Designing your life" really helped me. It encourages talking to people who are already in different fields / roles that interest you. When I did this, sometimes I found myself saying, "yes that sounds amazing." Other times I found myself saying, "ugh that's not what I thought it was at all." Eventually I decided that the best move for me was to sales engineering. It's engineering-adjacent so I can make use of my years of experience, but it's people-oriented and has tons of variety. You'll probably have a different final answer, but I highly recommend the techniques in the book. You may even find yourself a job you're excited about through the process of talking to people about what they do. https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-Joyful...

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Sales engineering always sounded great to me as well, and the few times I got a chance to participate in the sales process as a SWE it was always very interesting: meet new people, do work that is challenging but not mentally as draining as being torn apart in a code review, hang out after work with energizing and fun sales folks, ...

Just to collect one random datapoint, do you work for an enterprise-focused tech company? And how much travel do you do outside the pandemic? What would be the “FAANGs” for a SWE turning into a sales engineer?

For another data point..

> Just to collect one random datapoint, do you work for an enterprise-focused tech company?

Yes, B2B company in the enterprise space primarily.

> And how much travel do you do outside the pandemic?

My team's role is a bit odd. Think it as a super technical / strategic overlay team. Rather than being assigned to a set of sales reps or to a region, we're attached to the entire US. As a consequence, we're brought in to help with high-end use cases where an individual sales engineer might see the use case once a quarter at max. We also moonlight on strategic discussions around product strategy.

That being said, pre-pandemic, we'd generally travel on-site with customers 5-10 times a year. Travel for more normal sales engineers is a bit more. Maybe, on average, 1.5 full days every 2 weeks. It'll vary by geography. New York / New Jersey focused folks 'travel' more since there's a higher density of customers. For example, pre-pandemic, I traveled down to NY a few hours by train and stopped by 4 customers 6 hours. This is the first software company that I've worked for but based on chatting with departed colleagues, this varies wildly. Some sales reps are, for lack of a better term, abusive of their engineers' time. Think being told on Monday that you need to fly for 3 hours for a meeting on-site on Wednesday with a marginally qualified prospect (aka it's not clear they want our software or have the budget to purchase it).

Feel free to ask if you have other questions.

Thanks a bunch!

> do you work for an enterprise-focused tech company?

I work as a sales engineer for Databricks. As a SWE I had built cloud infrastructure like the equivalent of AWS S3 for the companies I worked for. So the technical nature of the product and customers appealed to me and made my skillset valuable to the role.

> how much travel do you do outside the pandemic?

I have not had this job outside the pandemic. I'm NYC-based, and my understanding is that I would have traveled by subway to meet clients quite often, but plane travel would have been only a few times a quarter.

> What would be the “FAANGs” for a SWE turning into a sales engineer?

When figuring out who you want to work for, I would suggest selling a product that you like to customers you would like to work with. If you like the product and the customers the job can be a joy. If not, it can be a slog. You have a huge leg up if you already have experience with the product or came from the industry that will be using the product. Another important thing to look at is the sales culture of the organization. Some organizations have aggressive sales cultures where the "win" is what matters regardless of all else. Other sales organizations are more focused on making their customers successful. As a former SWE, the customer success sales culture appeals far more to me.

One thing I really like about working for Databricks is that, while we do make commission, it's a pooled commission. So I get compensated on the performance of the team, not just myself. So it fosters a very collaborative atmosphere. We're always jumping in to help each other out. Individual commissions can make for a cut-throat sales culture. I probably make less money than I would with individual commissions, but I'm much happier. So that's another thing to look at: how people are compensated.

I've done some sales engineering work -- a day or couple weeks at a time usually -- if someone is out of office, if I might be able to speak to some particulary tech/stack that the prospect had, etc.

I got bored pretty quickly, mainly with doing demos.

I continue to look at Sales Engineer-type roles because part of me likes the idea of SELLING LIKE A * FIEND, but I can't seem to get past the idea of becoming a 'demo monkey' again.

Even if there was plenty of stuff to do that was not demos, a single demo each day felt like, 'Why am I doing this and not the sales rep?'

It kind of made me think of the infamous Adam Smith quote -- doing the same one or few tasks over and over would lead you to become "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

Some stuff was very technically sophisticated/nuanced, but most was not. I wonder if the orgs I worked for had just not optimized things, but I didn't see any obvious flaws in the process. POCs were all well-qualified, etc. Maybe the 'problem' was just that I might really only be needed to answer one or two questions during a sales presentation/demo, but you had to be there for the whole 30/60 minutes, paying attention, doing the demo, etc.

If a sales rep was late to a call I'd think, "Well I'm just gonna do the whole call because at least then i won't be just a demo monkey."

It just seemed like you had to be ok with saying the same thing over and over, even if you had customized demos/POCs, etc.

I think my ideal role would be split between at least 4 functional areas -- e.g. 2 hours of my day to sales, 2 to sales engineer, 2 to devrel, 2 to customer success -- something like that.

To OP: I've switched to Project/Product Manager/Owner, and that was great-ish, back to tech support and such, and currently about to start doing a TAM role.

One option that never really appealed to me, but which seems to be a viable option if you've got some cash/equity, is doing the whole 'investor' thing. You can start buying/flipping houses, do the Airbnb thing, or find folks to invest with -- e.g. you can put $50k into a real estate/atm/etc-type fund, get ~20% return per year, paid out monthly, 7 year limit, etc.

There's also the idea of buying some existing business and running it. Small coffee shop. Small online shop. etc.

Would it be hard to transition from that type of role back into a more product-engineering type position? Do you perceive there as being any stigma of engineering-adjacent roles?

If you're selling to engineers, it would be an easy transition. In fact, I could probably pretty easily find a job with one of my clients since they see me as an expert in the field. If you're selling to non-engineers it might be trickier. Just like with engineering, the next job you get can depend a lot on what you were doing previously. If you're coding or architecting as a sales engineer, you are set up well to do that in your next position. If you're selling a less technical product and are never really coding or architecting, then you will have to climb your way back if you want to return to SWE.

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