Hello HN,<p>I would love to hear you experience if you have tried switching your career to a different field especially Investment Banking or PE.
Or even tried something like sales or product management.<p>If so what have been trade offs and how were you able to adapt
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!<p>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.<p>The tricky tradeoffs for me have mainly been around interacting with the sales org.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But I'm the whole it's been a great move. I've learned (and am still learning) a lot.
Sales engineer like most things is chicken and egg<p>Presales is the same thing but with a bit more grunt work so could be a good place to start<p>There are many titles for it<p>Solutions engineer architect consultant etc<p>There are old books but they useless<p>Best I could think is to write a ebook yourself that way you find out firsthand what the job is<p>Update it annually as you learn more<p>SE at some companies is just straight sales<p>At some companies it is just dev nerd shit w a willingness to do braindead demos all day long<p>Be careful what you wish for