[bladegash]

Technical/consultative sales. The kind where customers come to you and are looking for advice/solutions, not the kind where you’re cold calling or fighting for leads.

Sales professions get a bad rap and rightfully so in some cases. However, if you find the right role, it’s incredibly rewarding to help customers solve problems, beat out competition, and have a measurable metric (money) to determine your level of success/contribution (or vice versa).

That last sentence is a big part of why people get burnt out, as in my opinion. It’s also something very difficult to measure in software engineering and attempts to do so (e.g., number of commits, lines of code, frequency, etc.) are nebulous measures. They also are useless with regards to determining if the business itself is successful/what your contribution to that success is.

[cwitty88]

Where do you find these jobs? Everything I see seems to require sales experience, which being a dev I do not have.

[poulsbohemian]

I looked back through your comments and noted you posted a similar Ask HN a couple months back... look if you are a CTO and have a reasonable network (or can quickly build a network) there are plenty of companies that would take you in a sales / pre-sales engineering type capacity on the basis that you:

a) presumably understand tech / can learn quickly b) will have street cred from your past experiences c) will presumably bring some kind of network / rolodex with you

So, don't stress - if you can put a confident foot forward, you probably have more going than you realize. It's just a matter of how you sell it to a future employer.

[muzani]

The first job I was offered was a sales engineer role. The interviewer said sales was easy. Understanding the product (oscilloscopes) was not and required at least a degree. The target market didn't care if you were charismatic, they just wanted the right to for the job.

There's plenty of highly technical things from databases to Jira that appreciate dev experience more than sales experience.

[bladegash]

Look for companies on the smaller to mid size businesses that do IT services consulting. Companies and the expectations of sales on the product side are much different from what I have seen (or enjoy).