I’m weary about tech support. I dreaded working in a call center before, and I don’t think I’d enjoy dealing with other people’s IT problems.
I’m considering the public sector, maybe this is more relaxed, employees don’t get worked as hard, fires can wait until the next business day, and you don’t take your work home… Maybe it’s what I need rather than a drastic career change?
Well, of course. Every paid job is horrible in some way – if there was nothing at all horrible, they wouldn’t have to pay anyone to do it.
The point is to find the right kind of horribleness that you can put up with.
That must be a US thing. Here in Canada it is very hard to get into a PhD program without a masters and certainly isn’t typical.
I’ve been a sales engineer (pre-sales support, sales consultant, solution consultant, client solutions manager, insert whatever title for same thing here) since 1999 and I have to admit it has been a very rewarding career choice for me. I graduated with a B.S. in computer information systems but knew fairly early on that writing code was not a path I wanted to take. I held roles as a QA analyst, a business analyst, a systems analyst, etc., for both large financial firms and consulting firms. I got introduced to the sales engineer role by a friend who worked for a fin-tech firm in 1999 and have never really looked back.
To be honest, the technology side of the job is not that important. Your coding skills really may give you insights into how a product works but that it is rare you’re addressing a sales situation from a coding/coder point of view. To put it another way, it isn’t a large component of my success and in driving sales. I hate the term but “the soft skills” are the key to success. It is being able to understand your product/solution from multiple points of view, understanding the motivators and obstacles of your audience, understanding the competitive landscape, understanding industry trends, and bring all that together sell the solution to a very varied audience with different needs and priorities. One technically correct answer may need to be presented differently to various roles at the client - IT, marketing, business owner, compliance/legal, risk/security, etc. It is more about the value to each vs. the technical point or product function. It is also about being able to build trusted relationships with your sales people who themselves will have vastly different styles and approaches. At the end of the day, you have to partner tightly with them to help them advance a deal forward and win the business.
I definitely encourage you to look down this path as an option if you think you have the requisite skills. Many times the role is a remote position so you get to work from home and I love not having a commute or having to dress for the office every day. The compensation is also very good. Travel is typically a significant part of the role so ask yourself what percentage of travel you can live with, both now and 5-10 years down the road. If you are married and/or have kids, how will travel disrupt your quality of life?
Feel free to ask me any questions, happy to provide an honest response of the good and the bad.
I’m sure it is too, but so is agility :). Sorry I don’t have anything more substantive to contribute - there is a lot of good advice in the thread already.
Perhaps. I don’t want to hijack this thread with discussions of the pros and cons of various project management methodologies, but it might be something I’d be interested in discussing in another thread.
To the OP’s point, I kind of feel like there are three main paths for software developers:
-Technical - Continuing to support the building and maintaining of technology
-Sales - Acting as a SME and otherwise supporting the sales and client support side of the business
-Project Management - Managing the delivery and oversight
Each has is own pros and cons and all can lead to management in various ways.
The nice thing about being in tech is that the world is not looking for ways to be less technical.
My son started writing. After ten years working at a large software house, he quit to write a book on his experiences and help raise his 4 kids. If you are interested, google “proudly serving”. I believe you can download free from his web site. After 3 or 4 years he went back and worked there for another dozen or so years, meantime writing a book about debugging. Look for “Find the Bug”, although AFAIK this one cannot be gotten free. It consists of 50 programs, five each in each of ten programming languages (unless it is ten in each of five–I have forgotten) each one “guaranteed” to have exactly one bug (someone found a second in one of them–wouldn’t you know). He used these as a frame to discuss debugging techniques. Last December, he left again and is writing a book on why software sucks.
I became a Systems Administrator and a high level support person after years of development work. It is like management in terms of authority but with fewer meetings and less paperwork. I work in an industrial facility that requires someone like me to be onsite so my job cannot be offshored which is a constant threat to lots of other positions. I also don’t have to sell anything and the only reason we bring in Project Managers is so that we will have someone to fire at the end that isn’t me. My job certainly isn’t ideal but they treat me extremely well, I have lots of autonomy and the results actually matter in the real world. There aren’t that many people that specialize in industrial IT, especially pharmaceuticals, so I can have another job easily if the mood strikes.
Agreed. I responded above that Sales Engineer was a good path to follow thinking of the SEs I deal with most now, for a Software Company that sells development software. When the product is software used by programmers then you have a leg up as a Sales Engineer assuming you have the skills to deal with the different roles of customer contacts. If the product is out of your area of expertise you may be in the wrong job unless the sales part of the job. In addition, even if you don’t have proficiency in dealing with every aspect of the product sales many SEs are members of teams that have specialized skills related to different aspects of the product and the sales process, so the right software development experience can be very valuable in it’s own right.