| A few years ago I made the jump from DevOps/SRE/sysadmin work over to sales engineering. It's actually been a great fit for me so far! I always felt like I wasn't built for pure tech positions - I'm not the kind of person who can code for eight hours at a time, and that's what many of my previous employers seemed to want from me. I love presenting, I enjoy helping people, and I like a fast pace and a broad variety of work. Sales engineering has been a great fit. The tricky tradeoffs for me have mainly been around interacting with the sales org. Some of the sales folks can be... you know how sales folks can be. They can have big personalities. And their incentives can be different to mine - where I am right now they're measured purely on attainment, and I'm measured on broader customer success. So it's been really important for me to understand how they work, how they're incentivised, how I can best help them while still ensuring my customers get the best outcome. The other tricky thing for me is being part of a group whose sole purpose is to sell. I never thought I'd be doing that - ringing the bell, ABC, coffee's for closers, etc. So it's really important for me to be selling a good product that will actually help customers, and to be able to be honest about its benefits and potential downsides. The minute someone tells me to sell something I don't believe in is the minute I get out of sales. But I'm the whole it's been a great move. I've learned (and am still learning) a lot. |