[poulsbohemian]

This sounds a lot like where I was around year ten in my career... I made a move into a niche area of technology consulting. That led to a whole lot of variety - I did pre-sales engineering, sold services, did a whole lot of high-profile consulting work, etc. Point being - if you are still enjoying technology but not the specific work you are doing or the company in which you are doing it, find a horizontal move into some other area.

Eventually, I burned out on all of it and went into real estate. That's a major jump and I wouldn't recommend it unless it's a field that really calls to you. Someone below mentioned licensing - there are a whole lot of niche fields that make the world go around. Think escrow officer, home inspector, insurance salesperson, home appraisal... not all of these might pay much, but there's a certain stability to them because it does take effort to get a license.

Speaking of which... if financial upside is part of your goal and you can get through the licensing, and if you like working with the general public... there's a good lifestyle to be made as a financial advisor / planner.

[cwitty88]

What kind of role did you have when you switched to real estate? I have actually been thinking about becoming an agent since you can make decent money and the licensing process seems rather simple for what it is.

I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

[poulsbohemian]

I've made personal contact with various people on HN over the years. I'd be glad to bounce ideas around about your current career or other options, just share your contact info in some way and we'll set up a call.

I was freelancing when I made the move to real estate, so in that regard I was already comfortable in a self-employed role. Many people in tech (myself included) are excessively introverted. If this describes you, you'll want to consider how you feel about a career move where lots of contact with the general public is necessary, and how you'll cope with that for yourself.

Yes, the licensing is straightforward - I'm licensed in two states and am considering getting my license in a third. That said, it's a lot like how we talk about the 10x engineer in software - there's a huge gap between having a license and actually being a skilled professional. The average US agent makes something like $60K a year, whereas the top earners (and of course market matters...) make many multiples of that. Real estate is not a monolith - there are many different directions you can take a career. If you aren't comfortable with being an entrepreneur / self-employed person, you'll have a harder time of it.

Again, happy to talk more about licensing, how to choose a brokerage, finding your niche, etc. Likewise, if you go down that path I'm happy to introduce you to mentors, contacts, etc where possible.

[levi-turner]

> I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

I am currently in technical sales (Presales is the name of my org).

This absolutely is not the case. There aren't a ton of folks crossing over but one of my team members did so and has been quite successful.

While it wasn't from a software engineering role, I moved to technical sales from the org's support group so I have the faintest sense of what pitfalls that you may go through.

At the end of the day, many folks in Support groups and R&D groups can fall into the trap of thinking narrowly about a problem. Let us take the problem of getting data into an application. In this scenario a customer asks you if your tool supports 'real time data'. The direct answer is no, it takes time for the tool to fetch / process / present the data from the source system. From a technical lens, this is absolutely, 100% correct. From a selling lens, it's helpful to redirect the conversation towards the customer's goal. Their goal is that they have the lowest latency data possible. This isn't a binary yes / no situation like the previous question.

Now it's relevant to ask questions like:

- What is the source system?

- Is the source truly the originator of the data or is it a downstream consumer of a pipeline?

- If it's not the originator, then how frequently is this pipeline run? Real-time? Micro-batch? What is the latency here?

- Is the source a fixed price system or a cloud-native platform (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, etc) where there are marginal costs per query?

- How many consumers will there be of this data? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Data approaches often can be cost / performance effective at one scale but flounder at another.

The net result is that the key question that you have to ask involves focusing on the _problem_ the potential customer wants to solve, not just the mechanics of how to solve it.

That plus

- the politics of the deal

- answering the question at the right level of grain for an audience (engineers get different frames of the same answer than VPs / Executives)

- positioning your differentiated techniques and technologies early in the deal to nudge out competitors (they will be doing the same)

- explaining broad or complicated techniques in a consumable fashion (aka a ton of PowerPoint slides) and a number of other aspects

Feel free to ping me (email is in my profile) if you want to chat more about this.