I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”.

I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every opportunity to put myself in front of the customer virtually and physically.

Learned through osmosis how the senior consultants, engagement managers (project managers) and account managers operated.

Got Amazoned almost 4 years later and became a staff consultant at a 3rd party firm (equivalent to a senior at AWS or GCP) and while I lead “delivery” projects, I’m still learning how things work at the next higher level of the funnel - pre sales. The level of ambiguity is high by the time it gets to me. But at least sales has narrowed down what high level business outcomes the customer wants.

My thesis is the closer I get to both the revenue drivers and where people skills matter, the less ageism is a factor and experience is actually rewarded and the harder it is to be outsourced, commoditized or replaced with AI. I’ve been concerned about commoditization for over a decade and that definitely happened on the enterprise dev side

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.

> Part of it was repetition. My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.

This isn’t “DevOps”. This is “IT Support”.

But honestly, if you aren’t embedded into a team where developers and infrastructure folks are working together - you aren’t doing anything differently than old school operations people did 25 years ago

What in god's name is the meaning of the image on their homepage? It looks like a conceptual, digital rendering of a colonoscopy.

https://infisical.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.c...

> answer the same support questions. Repeat.

This is not devops, this is someone managing yaml to allow an org to avoid doing devops.

Devops is practiced by everyone. If there are people asking the same questions over and over there is a feedback loop / education / automation problem and THAT is the part that makes a job devops.

I worked for 7 years employed by a high throughput computing facility at a large university as a combination of solution engineer/software architect. I got paid to network with faculty, listen to their problems, pitch them ideas and implement POCs, then help them iterate and scale.

If the management of the department hadn't been so catastrophically bad, it would have been the ideal job. Working more traditional software engineering roles afterwards was frustrating, I missed the freedom. Even as a tech lead, it just felt like managing plumbers. I love creativity and exploration, nuts and bolts are incidental.

My path was opposite...

Started in early 200x sysadmining Linux boxes. Moved to an MS gold partner that started with 6 employees and ended up with 45 by the time I left. So you can imagine the kind of work and solutions we did, started with mom and pop, ended up doing email systems for a 20k user system, also picked up vmware/sphere, perl scripting a big monitoring system for over a year and hacking old binary only legacy software to extract data, lots of extremely varied short term projects.

Then got onto the "Solutions Architect" career path. Did that for 6 years ending up in a big telco. I ended up being bored out of my mind just doing designs/tech sales/delegating all the "real work".

I decided to go into Devops and switch to contracting at the same time. I now realise that was over 10 years ago now.

I couldn't be happier with my job since then. It's 100% remote, It's hands on troubleshooting when things go horribly wrong, it's solving hard problems with automation and in last 2 years lots of AI when the clients decide to rip out a huge amount of integration and switch clouds/other software and so on every 2 years :-)

It pays a little less and definitely has less prestige than "Solutions" for a huge telco (and I no longer wear a suit at work), but I can definitely see myself being happy doing that for next 10 years (if the role still exists then).

The part about interacting with people really resonates with me. I went from a support and repair position to a SWE role. It should have been great. But I burned out really quickly because the contributions I was making were going off into a void (from my perspective). I didn't see our customers engaging with what we built so I had almost zero job satisfaction.

I moved into another support role sort of by accident when I really wanted a sysadmin job but didn't have the years of experience needed to get through the door. I found out (again, by accident) that engaging with our customers directly gave me the feedback and sense of accomplishment that I was missing. I now know that it's an essential component for me. I'm much happier having figured that out.

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!

Some people mentioned to me that going Solutions Engineer was a good way to get more non-technical/business skills.

I saw a few SEs starting their own companies later, seemingly because their SE roles "trained" them for the business side of things.

I considered doing this myself; however, I'm a freelance software engineer and technical writer. More a jack of all trades than someone with major skills in one category of software engineering.

side note, i absolutely love Infisical’s self-hosted offering. it’s really easy to get set up with and aside from a few minor problems with their Universal Auth, i had it working in production in just a few days. it’s made secret management a lot easier, especially across different environments!

i’m aware that there are limits on the free plan, but as a single user i haven’t hit any crazy restrictions

> But for me, it was missing something I didn't know how to name until I found it: the chance to be technical and connected.

I genuinely throught this was impossible for a very long time. In my SWE roles I’ve mostly felt disconnected and isolated.

I resigned from my last dev job and started working in donut and coffee shops. I loved it.

I’m pursuing Support Engineer roles now hoping it will provide the human focus that was missing prior.

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

Solution Engineering is a highly sought after role in startups and growth companies. It is an important role in established enterprises too but it won't be seen as an IP role. It is a great escape career path for engineers from pay scale change perspective. The author didn't touch upon that part but there was certainly a big salary increase.

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

Best job in the world.

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

Inspiring article. Well written. Totally feeling it!

I made the jump into SE (sales/solution engineering) three years ago after a long career as a SRE/systems/software engineer (the kind that found any excuse to break out ilspy, windbg, gdb and/or tcpdump on the job) and have a love-hate relationship with it.

This is a long post, but SEs are underrepresented here despite us being a big part of the sky high valuations that many companies on here have gotten, and it's a job that is still somehow not well known or understood.

I LOVE the travel. As someone whose happy place is seat 20F on a United 738 and a rental EV waiting on the other side, the random travel requests give me so much life. I enjoyed the 4 on, 3 off travel life as a consultant as well, but being asked to fly in for a meeting or two and get time to myself the day before is so much better. In fact, this is probably THE reason why I haven't gone back into the FTE world. Travel budgets for engineers are generally pithy.

I LOVE not having to answer to a Jira backlog. I can (and do) still ship PRs back to product if it makes sense for the customers I'm supporting, but my performance comp isn't tied to that. Interestingly enough, we are also not forced to use AI when coding for the same reason (though using it to understand what our customers are being increasingly asked to use is important, so I do sometimes).

Speaking of comp, I LOVE how transparent our comp packages are. The base salary is usually competitive with a high Senior/low Staff SWE, but unlike these roles, we don't get very many RSUs. What we do get is commission. The more we sell, the more we make. No black box bonus pool allocation nonsense. Some SEs can take in Staff+ total comp some years if they and their AE close a whale of a deal because of this. What's better about comp as an SE is that it's usually not regional. This makes the position super lucrative for engineers in LCOL/MCOL cities who don't mind getting on a plane every so often.

We also get a lot of time and space to tinker with the products we're selling when we're not out in the field (since we usually have to know them front to back; it's not uncommon for SEs to know more about a product than engineering or even Product). Most good SE managers will absolutely support you blocking off time to build, which is awesome!

Interviews are also WAY more than chill than those for SWE. No LC grinds. The hardest part is usually the tech panel (which is easy if you're good at presenting and explaining technical things in an accessible way).

So now onto the not so fun parts.

You are usually tied to a non-technical account executive (salesperson). The nature of that role attracts lots of...interesting people. Your entire existence as an SE hinges on how well you get along with your AE. A great relationship makes SE the best job in the world. Anything else makes it somewhere between a slog and hell on earth.

This is also a sales job at the end of the day. There's lots of talking and socializing involved. Not nearly as much as an AE, but doing happy hours and dinners sometimes comes with the job. As a massive introvert who often wants nothing more than to read Hacker News over a nice beer in sweet solitude at the end of an intense workday, you can probably imagine how draining these events can be.

Then there are the demos and POCs: the bread and butter of the role. Depending on where you are, you might be giving the same demo handfuls of times per day. These can be made more fun by working in investigative questions about the customer you're presenting to to learn more about them and why they need what you're selling (also called "discovery"), but some AEs won't give you that space. Feeling like your job is replaceable isn't great (even though it's not replaceable at all!)

There also isn't much upward mobility in this vertical. You can go a lot of places OUTSIDE the SE track given the cross-cutting nature of the job (Product, CTO, AE, and even back into engineering are common paths), but scope as an SE is narrower than the SWE path, as, again, its a sales job. (That said, getting into the Principal SE track usually involves talking at big shows and brand building like writing books, skills that are very useful if you want a heavy hitting job elsewhere or want to be the kind of person that gets paid to keynote conferences).

Many of the thought leaders in the SE space are technical but have lost their edge. Many of them are closer to sales than engineering. Some literally sell their presales methodologies and don't do technical stuff anymore. Great if you want to move away from that career; less so if you don't. More engineering-biased people might feel out of place initially.

Skill atrophy is also very real, counter to OPs observations. You can get away with minimal learning once you know what you're doing and have your demos locked in. It takes a while to get to this point, but once you're there, you can give a demo point blank a any time and are familiar enough with your product to lead a POC start to finish without blinking. This combined with not having time to "deep" learn due to meetings, demos and POCs can lead to skills slipping away.

Finally, that time to tinker can be hard to get if you're in a patch of heavy sales activity. This is felt the hardest when you join a new org and are sent into the field straightaway. This is often why so many SEs are usually former consultants of that product or ex-customers: shorter ramp-up time.

This can make it difficult to get back into a pure engineering role if SE doesn't work out. You won't have enough day to day experience to make hiring managers feel comfortable in bringing you on, which is a massive disadvantage in this market.

All in all, it's an awesome and somewhat safe career path that is a front row seat to how the money comes in, but it's heavily situational and probably not a fit for more introverted folks.

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!

> I started dreading the monotony of it all... My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.

Why are you checking dashboards (pull/polling) instead of building alerting (push), so that you do not need to check dashboards as a matter of routine? If the tickets are dealing with the same problem again and again, why aren't you building a self-service platform to let your users handle these problems by themselves (especially now that LLMs are making this much more trivial to build)?

Author sounds like he had poor technical management who didn't understand DevOps (let alone DevSecOps) and turned it into an operations role.

Everything that the author likes about Solutions Engineering, I get from a DevOps role, from collaborating with other engineers in my company to make them more agile, productive, and take better ownership in production. Too many engineering teams fall into a trap of not being allowed to focus on any non-functional work (gotta ship revenue-generating features!) and LOVE it when someone like me comes along, who doesn't answer to Product, and can help them out on the non-functional side. I get to talk to "customers" as much as I want, in a role where I can just walk up to them and not need to communicate over Zoom or with significant plane travel.

Author should have considered trying to just find a different Platform Engineering role.

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).