Comment by mancerayder
18 days ago
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 “?