Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

Perhaps a sales engineer?

> I am just much more comfortable supporting existing software than building new software.

Having technical skills is required, but you'd be doing little to no coding or design work.

> Being an interface between business and tech.

A sales engineer matches this almost by definition.

> Just working with people in general!

The job is essentially entirely about working with people, both with the customers you're trying to sell to, and with the developers who are actually making the product.

This also has the added benefit of making a lot of money even by engineering standards in the right organization. Looks for large enterprise companies where custom demos and new customer hypercare are standard. I've been on the other side of the table a few times and often pre-sales cycles are months long and contracts start in the $2-4M range. Those are the places where sales engineers will be treated as first-class citizens and not just "hey grab one of the engineers for this sales call."

I think I can second this. I was offered an FAE job (essentially the sales engineer of hardware) and they were going to pay me more money to write no code and spend most of my time in the road talking to people about products. But I like writing code. Presumably a great job for somebody who doesn't/can't.

This is honestly a career path I’ve never really considered, but after reading about it a little bit the role sounds like it would be right up my alley. I’m going to explore the market for sales engineers here in Sweden and see what kinds of roles are available. Thanks for your comment.

Background: Support --> Technical Sales

The job aspects which you listed are more aligned with support roles rather than technical sales / presales / solution architects. On the technical sales side, there's less time spent exploring / troubleshooting compared to presenting what is already built. Some companies have overlay technical sales teams which act as SMEs for technical sales where there is more time spent exploration and troubleshooting and less time spent doing basic demos.

One constraint that you need to be mindful of: salary. Support roles do not pay particularly well if your goal is to live a middle+ class lifestyle. Happy to chat with specifics from my experience if you reach out. I see that you live in Sweden where the upside for technical sales from a salary perspective is lower than in the US.

Do you usually need experience in sales to land a sales engineer job?

For the most part, probably no, because a sales engineer requires substantial engineering experience, so requiring sales experience on top of that would limit the candidate pool too much. I'm sure that there are higher-level sales engineer roles that require previous sales experience, but the OP's previous engineering experience should be enough to land an entry-level role.

> I am just much more comfortable supporting existing software than building new software.

> It honestly gives me a huge sense of accomplishment when I get to see a customer making use of our products, and helping them investigate why something may not be working.

> I've learned that money isn't everything.

Put this at the top of your resume, send it around to a few headhunters and see what comes back.

Many (most?) developers are not very interested in supporting someone else's work. The customer seems to get it even worse. AI has turned the ego trips up to 11. You have an advantage if you genuinely feel this way about these topics and can sell that feeling to others.

A few years into my career I realized that I was not cut out to code. Luckily I worked for a good employer and they told me that code was 5% of the business regardless of what the sign over the door said. Over the next 20 years I spent time doing QA, tech support, product management, professional services, and sales engineering.

Rightly or wrongly there is a hierarchy of job roles and QA and tech support are low down on that list. But if you want to stay in the industry that your org serves (eg healthcare, energy, telecom etc) they are good ways to gather real industry experience.

Product is hard but devs do appreciate someone who can clearly tell them what is needed without micromanaging them (and tell the customer what is possible and what is not).

Pro services is great if you have good human skills but it can be a tough sell (some orgs treat it like a body shop, some customers think they dont need it, some sales orgs throw it in for free meaning you are underwater immediately).

Sales Engineering can be lucrative and fun, but only if you are paired up with a good sales team that doesnt treat you like a demo and slideware robot.

I'll be blunt rather than couch it: all the things you've listed will make you a ralph loop target in the org. You are adding human in the loop where the industry is moving in the opposite direction.

This is generally true across all roles, but first impact will be working that is more trivial for an agent or n8n flow.

So consider this and pick roles wisely, where you can see this existing for a bit. All the best.

I find this a very engineering/technology focused point of view. Most business related functions run on this “human in the loop” with zero hints from industry this will change anytime soon - quite the opposite.

Even if we take purely engineering, support and operations functions, there is still plenty of “human glue” in the organizations that allow for them to function - the larger the org, the more often you need to interface people between each other, and corner cases become more complex.

Big Tech which is the most vocal about their technological savviness is a great example: pretty much nothing has changed on business and cross-functional side since the 90th and earlier, all key decisions are made via Powerpoint, memos and personal contacts. Jeff’s innovation of preparing and reading a one page of problem statement and proposal at the beginning of a meeting was considered breakthrough in this field. No LLM in sight that can magically fix this [semi-ironically] beautiful mess.

And don’t get me started on B2B Sales and Partnerships.

Depending on where you start it could be a bigger salary drop than you expected, but it sounds like technical support might be your real passion. I’m the same way - I love in-the-weeds troubleshooting and helping people solve their business problems. I started out in SaaS sales, hated it, switched to IT during the pandemic. Another commenter mentioned systems integrators, you could also look at managed services. See if you can get into an escalations role so you’re not having to climb out of the help desk which you’re probably overqualified for. Look up companies that make products you love and see what openings they have. There’s no shame in supporting others.

Developer Experience is gaining in popularity. Your clients are internal and your objective is to remove obstacles, create shortcuts, keep everyone happy and productive. Lots of it is communication, finding out everyone's pain points and discussing what is technically feasible to ease that frustration - so that may tickle your people/support string. Things that are/can be part of DevEx are DevOps/Platform Engineering/Infra/CI/CD, QA, IdP, internal frameworks, onboarding, etc. Fun stuff imo.

Sounds like you may enjoy being a QA engineer. Good QA engineers are a really really good value add to a software team and can really save our ass. Technical QA engineers understand why things break, and are easy to coordinate with when preparing a larger release.

At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.

> Wanted to work with tech from a more overarching level

> I get a huge sense of accomplishment seeing customers user our product’

> Interface between business and tech

You might like trying your hand in Professional Services either at a System Integrator like Deloitte or first-party in a product company (now often re-labelled as ‘forward deployed engineers’).

Their main problem space is getting customers to successfully use the product through marrying your understanding of the tech’s limitations and sweet spots with the customer’s organizational goals and culture, so daily work revolves less around deep technical design and more about org alignment and strategy (which is why SIs sometimes get a bad rap on a tech forum like HNews).

It probably pays less, and it can be more stressful when you’re billing for (and justifying) every hour, but in my experience the way it tends to be more dynamic (new projects+teams+customers often) and how you get to see very direct impact is quite rewarding.

If you have a secondary interest or hobby or real-world-knowledge about what consumers in a certain category want - you might be a good product manager in that field.

Many products require technical product managers.

Being people oriented and a "mediocre" technical engineer is not really a hinderance and can make your focus better aligned customer needs in a high level, not getting nerd-sniped on things that don't matter.

I suspect that engineers would prefer working under someone like you who doesn't have a god-like ego, and is likely to resolve conflicts between people.

* Business analyst and Scrum Master

* Test Automation Engineer

If you want to remain technical I strongly advocate for the second option. It can be super technical and if you end up in an organization where the primary developers suck at what they do (or their management keeps them locked up as infants) you can end up doing more engineering than the developers you are supporting.

Great decision! When development jobs are largely replaced by AI, there is greater shift of demand in jobs that require people good at communication and willing to take responsibilities. Good luck!

What about testing / QA / reliability? Plenty of such positions. Not particularly competitive to get into, as many view those jobs as "lesser" jobs.

Software sales engineering could be another, which probably also pays more. But, alas, more competitive.

Eh, SREs are generally considered harder to get into with more responsibility than regular development roles, unless I misunderstood what you meant with “reliability”.

Modern big tech software engineering is 98% supporting and maintaining.

AI does this really well, even better than new development. I regularly use Github copilot to automatically read production logs from the app and backend services, find errors logs, deeply scan the codebases, create theories about the issue, verify the theory matches production evidence, verify the theory in a sandbox env, create a failing test, and then suggest a minimal code change in a feature branch, verify test is passing now in sandbox, and submit a pr, along with a detailed analysis doc and any future design optimizations to fix the class of error.

AI is also very good at scanning legacy codebases, and reverse engineering design docs, system interfaces, and trying to reverse engineer what requirements and design tradeoffs lead to that system. It's not perfect, but already at medium software engineer level.

Someone mentioned PS, also consider if this new FDE thing is for you in that case.

Some other people suggested QA, if you enjoy interfacing with customers I would also suggest you look into the PM role.

your skillset sounds like perfect match for technical presales engineer ... you need to work at an enterprise software company, where they sell big tickets software of tens of thousands of dollar service, so you're part of the ensemble, but the sale is big enough and technical enough that they have a pre-sales engineering team. You are 50% customer, 50% medium intensity technical but you just use/config/troubleshoot without being the engineer responsible for building

We're in the AI era now, every job is a supporting role.

I have a coworker who is incredible at the job it sounds like you want. The "keep customers happy" role. It's a massively important role in a company. It's part product support, part sales support and part product owner.

2026 has made him way more useful to us engineers. Before he used to send us tickets. Sometimes we delivered what the customer really wanted because of those tickets, and sometimes we needed a few iterations.

Now he uses AI to deliver pull requests that include full repro environments. These are slop, of course. Sometimes we can approve them almost unchanged. But more often they need to be completely rewritten. But even the latter is super valuable as a much more concrete representation of the bug or customer request than a ticket was.

Solutions architect post-sale fits better if you hate quotas. Same work, calmer.

I'm probably in the same boat as you, thanks for asking this question.

Smaller or faster growing companies often need versatile people that can speak to customers and developers.

Or find a tiny niche where you can leverage technology to make a customer life easier. Then do that for more customers.

Or experiment in a consultant capacity outside of the day job.

Stepping back to big picture, your comments about versatility and helping the customer scream small business opportunity rather than big corporate.

And when I say small I think that’s a great thing (autonomy, financial independence) in contrast to Silicon Valley venture capital culture.

Technical pre-sales?