Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales engineering always sounded great to me as well, and the few times I got a chance to participate in the sales process as a SWE it was always very interesting: meet new people, do work that is challenging but not mentally as draining as being torn apart in a code review, hang out after work with energizing and fun sales folks, ... Just to collect one random datapoint, do you work for an enterprise-focused tech co…
> do you work for an enterprise-focused tech company? I work as a sales engineer for Databricks. As a SWE I had built cloud infrastructure like the equivalent of AWS S3 for the companies I worked for. So the technical nature of the product and customers appealed to me and made my skillset valuable to the role. > how much travel do you do outside the pandemic? I have not had this job outside the pandemic. I'm NYC-base…
I got bored pretty quickly, mainly with doing demos.
I continue to look at Sales Engineer-type roles because part of me likes the idea of SELLING LIKE A * FIEND, but I can't seem to get past the idea of becoming a 'demo monkey' again.
Even if there was plenty of stuff to do that was not demos, a single demo each day felt like, 'Why am I doing this and not the sales rep?'
It kind of made me think of the infamous Adam Smith quote -- doing the same one or few tasks over and over would lead you to become "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
Some stuff was very technically sophisticated/nuanced, but most was not. I wonder if the orgs I worked for had just not optimized things, but I didn't see any obvious flaws in the process. POCs were all well-qualified, etc. Maybe the 'problem' was just that I might really only be needed to answer one or two questions during a sales presentation/demo, but you had to be there for the whole 30/60 minutes, paying attention, doing the demo, etc.
If a sales rep was late to a call I'd think, "Well I'm just gonna do the whole call because at least then i won't be just a demo monkey."
It just seemed like you had to be ok with saying the same thing over and over, even if you had customized demos/POCs, etc.
I think my ideal role would be split between at least 4 functional areas -- e.g. 2 hours of my day to sales, 2 to sales engineer, 2 to devrel, 2 to customer success -- something like that.
To OP: I've switched to Project/Product Manager/Owner, and that was great-ish, back to tech support and such, and currently about to start doing a TAM role.
One option that never really appealed to me, but which seems to be a viable option if you've got some cash/equity, is doing the whole 'investor' thing. You can start buying/flipping houses, do the Airbnb thing, or find folks to invest with -- e.g. you can put $50k into a real estate/atm/etc-type fund, get ~20% return per year, paid out monthly, 7 year limit, etc.
There's also the idea of buying some existing business and running it. Small coffee shop. Small online shop. etc.