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Comment by moneywoes | Hacker News Reader

as an engineer how do i escape being part of this cost center?

seems becoming a SDM would be included

Become a sales engineer. You become part of the profit center.

How has this worked out for you? When I graduated college, I had an offer for a software engineering position and a sales engineer position. I went with the software engineering position as it paid better and I felt like it would be a safer career path, but I’ve always wondered what it was like for people in that line of work.

I did not take this path.

I know a Principal engineer who did, and he says it's been very lucrative. This was a guy who ran his own business for many years, wrote a few books and everything, before being hired as principal engineer where I worked at the time. He stuck it out as a principal for a few years before going to sales engineering.

I asked him why the switch and he just said, "You make a lot more money in sales engineering".

Did you get a sense of the stress level or work/life balance of the role?

Not the parent but one of the requirements when I shifted into dedicated sales engineering was a healthy work life balance. It has worked out that way so far - I’m very happy and it’s relatively low stress.

Nice! I'm glad you were able to make that work.

Sometimes it's hell (like during prime selling season or trying to hit quota before end of quarter) because you'll be on calls and doing demos and the like almost constantly, but other times it is completely chill.

Good to know. I prefer something a bit more consistent, personally.

The guy seemed really at ease most of the time. I didn't get to cross paths with him too much, so who knows for sure.

Makes sense!

I’ve done both and found Sales Eng (also called Solutions Eng) aligns more to my own interests.

You can always give it a shot. I was on a kind of non traditional engineer path for most of my career (lots of startups with ambiguous roles) and transitioned into a large company as a sales engineer. Engineers who can talk to “normal” people are very valuable.

> Engineers who can talk to “normal” people are very valuable.

I am not a sales engineer, but this describes my current role well. (Technically my title is "Cloud Solution Architect", but it's about the 4th title I've had for doing the same job for the same department)

Generally speaking, my communication skills seem to be stronger than my peers. I’ll have to look into this further. Thank you for your insight!

It's great if you don't mind travel and being in front of customers. You also won't make as much as a staff eng at a FAANG though you'll pull good money and don't have to live in an expensive city to get it

Until the company increases your quota to "blood from stone" levels and you can't find a new job because you've become too specialized

Work at a business that knows it's value is in producing stuff people want to buy.

Microsoft and Google haven't produced anything new in a long time, so engineering is a money pit. Older companies with stable products, they don't see innovation as useful, engineers are just the factory workers. The cheaper to stamp out a widget, the better.

Work for a SaaS company then you are a profit center.

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