I've been a professional software programmer for the past 6 years, been programming for fun since I was around 15.
I work for a company that sells a technical product and the sales team is looking for people with a good technical undertanding of the product. They call the position "sales engineer".
I've never done sales or sales engineering and so was wondering if HN had any advice, anecdotes or teachings around the good and the bad parts of moving to sales or sales engineering. If you have any cool resources to share, that would also be great.
https://careers.google.com/stories/google-sales-engineering-...
https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/solutions-engineering-...
https://builttoadapt.io/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-pivotal-platf...
Pros:
+ A lot of customer interaction. Could help you boost communication, presentation and sales skills if you want to start consulting
+ Quite a dynamic role, your agenda is not planned for next weeks but gets filled pretty fast with RFPs, Workshops, Demos, Proof of Concepts, etc.
+ As you are working in between of Sales, Product and Support/Delivery teams - that gives you a good perspective to provide valuable feedback across the company
+ Travel (can get boring after couple years though, and check with your partner if he/she is ok with that)
Cons:
- Some organizations are doing (Enterprise) Sales in old school way, in that case, Sales may just dump on your work they don't want to do like filling RFPs (Excel file with 100+ line of questions) or doing standard demos
- Your technical skills may stagnate as you would be less hands-on, but that depends on the type of the product (e.g. SaaS vs SDKs, Platforms)
- In terms of career development, you actually would have to choose if you want to go back to tech focusing on Solutions Architecture, or to Sales/Management roles
Before agreeing to the role - discuss the actual responsibilities (and ask those to be put on the job description), as well as the percentage of travel.