I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

My path went from engineering-aligned (math) to engineering management back to engineering to product to program management to solutions engineering to account executive.

Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So that's a weird feeling.

One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to both real users and unique environments is important for their growth and novelty in the job.

I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. It just happens to be a wider spectrum of things vs their usual "write YAML" in that 1 role. Sounds like the original poster found a more enjoyable role with the same title?

I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/120-skills-i-use-in-an-sre-pl.... I do agree, it is fun to mix it up in your day to day (IMO).

Wow, I think I’d love this job. Nothing more interesting than learning about lots of different unique problems from different industries. And totally get the fear of losing technical edge

It's always nice when the customer wants to improve the process/product, it can overcome internal friction that had prevented making things better.

I really loathe that sales engineers stole the term Solutions Engineer which was previously used to basically mean support/services engineer (technical generalist), a mostly post-sales role. It's pedantic, but I watched it happen in real time, my company's HR even asked if we could change our team titles to help out the sales team since they wanted the more appealing title to use.

The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.

Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!

Inspiring article. Well written. Totally feeling it!

My experience in a “product company” - Pre-sales solutions engineer - the original problem solver. Professional services - post-sales firefighter :)

I am a software developer. I went to college to learn software development. Two years ago, they tried to tack DevOps on to my job description. I told them "no thanks", then had to find another job. I found one and am MUCH happier not having to do that DevOps crap. No offense, but it a soul-draining undertaking, and I like writing code ... ONLY!

Best job in the world.