Ask HN: Is a career in software development the easiest way to maximize income?

[tootall]

Hello HN

I'm a "typical" software engineer working as a team lead in SF for a small startup. Reading a few threads on salaries, it seems the average compensation in the area for software engineers (employees, including salary and various bonuses and excluding startup stock options) is capped at about 200-250k. A smaller pool of employees is also able to pull in more (250k-500k) by working for several years in Google/Facebook/...

I've also been talking to many people who work in sales for tech companies (sales account managers and pre/post sales engineering) and, while the base salary of those people is on average smaller compared to the core engineers' one, I consistently see those people earning commissions that put them in much higher income ranges. It seems completely normal for them to consistently pull in about 500k a year or more.

At the same time, the entry barrier for those positions doesn't seem to be any harder than the software engineering one. For a sales engineer role, which is the one requiring the highest level of technical skills, it seems a matter of picking the right company (namely any successful B2B big tech corporation, mid size company or startup) and being able to have a reasonably technical conversation with a customer as well as doing some basic troubleshooting and support. This has been confirmed by pretty much all my acquaintances working in those positions in the bay.

I'd just love to to get some opinions from the wise HN audience on this matter.

[marktangotango]

I have observed this myself. At one company I worked at, with about $50M in annual sales, the 'top sales' award was fiercely competed between two guys who'd each got about $10M in sales for the year. I don't know what the commission structure was, but at 10% that's $1M.

Those two were a breed apart however. They could talk to anyone, everyone liked them. They could work product and project mgmt teams to get just enough done to make the deal. The product at the time was a bit of dog too. I don't know how they did it, One thing I observed was; they seemed to have deep contacts in the companies they were selling to. How they developed these networks, I don't know. I think that is the "secret sauce" so to speak.

[tootall]

But you don't always need to build a network yourself: in my experience, if you're reasonably bright from the technical point of view, you get paired with a sales account manager who will chase the deals for you, so you just show up, take care of the (relative simple) technical bits, and get your commission. He will do everything else.

[marktangotango]

Ah ok, I missed you were specifically talking about sales engineering, my mistake.