Been a software engineer for about 5 years now.

One of the best roles I ever had for my professional development was as a sales engineer.

Working in a different role at a MAMAA now with less customer interaction. Yet, learning soft skills like understanding who stakeholders are and their pain points increased my efficacy by orders of magnitude.

I didn't go into this line of work with the intent of capitalizing on my people skills but there's only so far technical competence can take you.

Solving problems is the easy and fun part of the job. Focusing your energy on solving _useful_ problems while developing the listening skills and humility to understand what other people view as problems and managing stakeholder expectations is the hard part.