[apohn]

>Last year I started my own company and then got acqui-hired into a startup. I realised that talking to customers and solutioning is more fun than wiriting code. How many of you have felt or feel the same way and what are you doing about it?

There's a job title for exactly this - Solutions or Sales Engineer.

I've worked in this role in the past and here's a bit caveat. Due to time pressures your technical skills may (will!) erode and it's very easy to reach the point where you simply become a talking head for a particular vendor's architecture and you hand wave around the hard/technical questions. It's entirely possible to end up in a position where you simply regurgitate the same architecture slide decks over and over.

You have to decide how technical you want to be and how much time you want to spend talking and pick roles accordingly. When a technology is new and probably half-baked (e.g. Hadoop in the early years), you'll be of higher value by having technical skills. When it's mature and has a GUI, being good at selling and demos is more important.

One of the nice things about some (not all) Solution/Sales Engineer roles is that you code enough to enjoy it, but not so much that you find yourself caught up with all the stuff that's needed when you are a full time developer building stuff for production.