Comment by raw_anon_1111
20 days ago
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
How would one go from devops or sre management to a customer facing pre sales role like you described?
I thought sales was a separate career path.
I relate 100 percent to your realization about competing with 25 year olds on Leetcode. I'm comfortable, but I realize finding a new job is harder than ever, even though I am as valuable as ever - they want me not only to have proven I can 10x a company managing infra and people (I did and have), but they expect me to spend my weekends coding, and not just coding but coding esoteric algorithms than no one uses outside of academia.
And meanwhile there's an enormous amount of messages here on HN about how managers are useless and mean.
It's a weird spot to be in, so I'm opting for trying to prepay mortgages as quickly as humanly possible before I'm unemployed forever and have to call it retirement (and which might have to take place in a cheaper foreign country).
I too am working on my out of the country back up plan. My wife and I are going to one of those countries for 5 weeks in a couple of weeks. We have already looked into residency requirements as a Plan B.
I am just starting to get a peek under the cover for sales. If I understand it correctly.
- “Someone” is hustling to make first contact with the customer or if you are a partner of one of the cloud providers, they send customers your way. I have no clue how this part works.
- The SA talks to the potential client enough to get high level business requirements to shape the contract. I’m not an SA. But there is a certain AWS speciality where I’m usually pulled in at this phase. We are trying to build expertise around this specialty. My former mentee is an SA at AWS so I know how they operate.
- After the contract is designed, I work with sales to understand the opportunity and I am the first person that does a deep requirement analysis - the business case is known, the technical requirements are ambiguous. I am responsible for getting the requirements and doing the design, talking to the technical guys, finance, security and the business folks to make sure their needs are met.
- then I lead the project, before AI, I would have needed a couple of people on the project. Now I can do it myself most of the time. It was never lack of knowledge, there are only so much I can do myself.
To your second question, the last 2016-2024 when I set on this path is a lot different than it is now.
I guess the best way is to work backwards from where you want to be to where you are.
1. How often do you know the business requirements in advance compared to how often are they given to you?
2. The money and the opportunities are in leading migrations. There are very few decent paying hands on keyboard “doers” those are easy to outsource. I lucked up that I got my job in a division that does care about “developers who know cloud and can lead implementations”
3. How are your project management skills? The ugly truth is PMs are useless when it comes to tech projects, you are the one that has to have the proper context to know dependencies, how to break things down, critical paths, etc.
4. Have you led implementations larger than what you can do yourself? Hands on keyboard folks are a dime a dozen and companies can pay them a fifth of what they pay you.
5. How are your presentation and communication skills? Can you explain what you did to someone non technical but knows their business, sonríe who understands technology but not what you did and someone who knows the technology and wants to know why you made the decisions you made?
6. Do you have experience juggling conflicting stakeholder agreements
7. How is both your small talk and business speak - “adding on to what Becky said”, “finding alignment”, “a single pane of glass”, “taking things to the parking lot”, “we aren’t solutioning yet, let’s talk about your business opportunities and challenges “?
is there anyway you'd be willing to field a few questions from a soon to be cs grad interested deeply in this specific career path after realizing they'd been doing it in a way for free already. good experience, but unconventional experience who aspires to a position similar to yours?
Everyone I know who has done it, started out as a developer, moved up to a tech lead position and while doing so learned soft skills and presentations and gut real world experience with designing systems and then moved into consulting.
It’s from my seeing the lay of the land in 2026 almost impossible to get a full time job in a consulting company starting out of a college with just an undergrad doing something technical - unless you are in one of the cheaper countries to hire from.
Most besides the WITCH companies use the business models of hire people in the US for the customer facing roles and hire people in cheaper countries for the Lower level roles.
Luckily I am US based, but unfortunately looks like there's no way out of the developer grind for a few years.
I have presentation skills and plenty of soft skills but no experience building complex b2b systems. I've, for many a year, done a very basic version of my understanding of the role for non profits, business and individuals. designed technical solutions of all sorts but mostly just met their needs with existing software along with education.
I was hoping I could enter straight into customer facing roles but I suppose I was simply really holding out hope I could avoid what I've heard called, so lovingly, "the code mines". Any further suggestions would be greatly welcome.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond and offer this wisdom.