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

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

#101

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mancerayder wrote: post #98
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And once you have the infra team saying no all of the time and being antagonistic - you’re back to old school operations and you aren’t a DevOps shop.

But if they never say no, how do you maintain central infrastructure standards? If you say yes all the time, I feel like that's how you turn devops into Ops monkeys who are reactive, since people are operating on Sprint timelines instead of optimizing for long-term stability.

Looking through the AWS lens because that’s the one I know.

The goal of the centralized ops team is to put just enough guardrails on the Organization (a group of AWS accounts) to keep the company in compliance - no public access S3 buckets, no one has organization::* permissions, set budget limits per account or organizational units etc, establish budget thresholds (or in the case of Isengard - AWS’s account vending machine - you can do almost anything except spin up an Oracle DB) . Let each team be responsible for their own deployments, monitoring, etc. For the most part, the top level operations department should be responsible for the Organization, setting up service control policies, Security monitoring and then the embedded DevOps person should be an SME not the department of “no”.

If you make the dev team a long with the embedded ops person responsible for their account/monitoring and they get called once a twice, they will figure it out

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

#102

Post by dilyevsky »

antonvs wrote: post #59
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud + app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard. What’s the difference between a “DevOps team” in 2026 than “operations” in 2001?

The difference is what they do. Assisting other teams with creating fully automated build and test pipelines. Managing infrastructure using automated systems. Identifying issues in production systems that other teams should look at, down to a level of granularity that wasn’t really possible in 2001. > affective You mean “effective”.

That was very much present in 2001 except it was two separate teams: qa and sysadmins

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

#103

Post by nunez »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #88
nunez wrote: post #57

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…

Thank you. Can't upvote you enough for the info.

My pleasure!

I forgot one more thing. Your technical aptitude carries less weight as an SE. Getting the technical win at a customer is what you're evaluated on.

Since you're almost always working with engineers and technical stakeholders at the customers you're selling to, you need to be able to talk the talk to fit in, gain their trust and help them see the value of what you're selling.

But those skillets alone won't get the technical win. This is where the sales part of sales engineering matters, and it matters a lot.

A quick example: a common mistake many new SEs coming from consulting make while giving demos is showing customers everything about a product step-by-step instead of showing them only what the customer said they care about (which you, hopefully, learned in the initial discovery call) and/or what they need to see (because other similar customers usually care about those things).

The former comes very naturally to consultants, as that's a big part of the job, but giving demos this way makes it much easier to NOT show what the customer needs to see AND increases the likelihood of you showing a deficiency in the product that can reduce interest or, if it's bad enough, kill the deal.

You won't come across those kind of skills unless you (a) founded a company and try hard to build business or (b) work in sales. But these skills make or break SEs.

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

#104

Post by fuzzythinker »

nunez wrote: post #103
fuzzythinker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Can't upvote you enough for the info.

My pleasure! I forgot one more thing. Your technical aptitude carries less weight as an SE. Getting the technical win at a customer is what you're evaluated on. Since you're almost always working with engineers and technical stakeholders at the customers you're selling to, you need to be able to talk the talk to fit in, gain their trust and help them see the value of what you're selling. But those skillets alone won'…

Even more gems than the previous post!

Btw, not sure if you're aware, your 2 resumes are linked to the same content

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

#105

Post by tstrimple »

mancerayder wrote: post #82
ikjasdlk2234 wrote: post #2

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…

How do you get to sales from engineering? Must it take place laterally in the same company, or did you sell yourself differently to recruiters, or did you know someone?

A fairly easy role to help bridge that gap is to work in a consulting company as a technical IC. The sales team is always looking for technical folk to help build more robust and achievable projects as well as provide a more accurate estimate for number of resources and amount of time the project will take. They need someone who can push back on impossible client demands and help the sales team understand what those are and why. Ideally in these scenarios a senior tech person would be helping build out the proposal and plan for a project they will actually run and execute on. This gives the client continuity throughout the process and in the course of working within the client environment you’re in a great position to spot other problem areas the client struggles with and help build proactive proposals to help the client address them.

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

#106

Post by codezero »

cootsnuck wrote: post #39
codezero wrote: post #3

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 t…

In my experience, it just entirely depends on the company. Different companies will use the same title and they can have wildly different mixtures of pre vs post sales involvement. My career has all been customer/client facing technical roles. Titles range from: - support engineer - solutions engineer - sales engineer - applied engineer - forward deployed engineer - solutions / sales architect - field engineer And th…

I should probably date myself, most of this wasn't true 10+ years ago. forward deployed/field, yep, Palantir has kind of owned that. Solutions Architect has definitely been cross functional for a long time, but solutions engineer is a title that I am pretty confident was post-sales first. I A/B tested the title back in 2014 between Product Analyst (candidates too junior), Support Engineer (too much IT/back office support, not enough experience w/ paying customers). Solutions Engineer hit a sweet spot and brought in the best candidates: Generalists who aren't really sure what they want to do, but with broad access to code/product/engineers and customers eventually find a speciality they like.

Because these folks are problem solvers, the title brought a reputation which is exactly why the sales folks wanted to co-opt the title. It conveyed trust and experience. When used well, it's still a good fit in pre-sales for building out POCs and delivering value, but more often than not, it's just sales engineering where they're qualing out potential customers that aren't worth the time of the sales team. Which is fine, except that this is MY title :)

To be clear, I take this a little personally as I was an early adopter of the title. It's kind of like those folks that get annoyed when you're a fan of a band that they liked before you ever heard of them, I admit it.

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

#107

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mancerayder wrote: post #84
Roark66 wrote: post #56

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 l…

How can I pay you to tell me your secret path to consulting in DevOps? I'd love to do this or SRE type consulting. However, every organization I've worked with (including finance and government) use big name big business consulting shops, supposedly for liability reasons, and it would be impossible to get a small consulting contract unless you had family members in the C suite. Moreover, what stops that remote devops…

To a first approximation, no big company wants to deal with independent contractors.

My two anecdotes:

About a decade ago, I was leading a project and the director wished he could have “another me”. I told him about a guy who I had worked with who would be good. He wanted $80/hour. My director liked him. He wouldn’t pay my friend $80/hour as an independent contractor. But he would pay a consulting company $110/hour to hire him and then he work for us and he would still get his $80/hour.

Second anecdote: when I was between jobs for a month, a former CTO wanted me to do a side project for him - same situation, he wouldn’t pay me directly because of liability reasons what I wanted. But I reached out to the same consulting company and made the same deal. That went through immediately.

> Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers for 40 percent of the rate?

If your value add is only tactics and not strategy, you’re going to have a hard time getting decent rates consulting or even working for consulting companies.

I work in consulting now. I get paid - decently - while I do hands on work, I can also lead projects and do more strategy type projects.

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

#108

Post by jameshush »

cootsnuck wrote: post #40
jameshush wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000%. When the sale doesn't go through, it's the salesperson's fault. When the product doesn't work, it's the "real" engineer's fault. When everything works, the client gives you a high five. If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real" engineers. As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo kinda works during the call, you're 10/10. At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a lev…

Yup, it is. It's my bread and butter too. So much so I decided to just do it for myself and start my own consulting company. Being a solutions engineer at the right companies means you get to be one of the few people with full end-to-end visibility of the entire lifecycle of both a client and the technology adoption, deployment, optimization, maintenance, etc. process. And you'll get to see it dozens or hundreds of t…

@cootsnuck, if I didn't really love working with the people/company I'm at now, I'd also start my own consulting company.

Once I realized you really only need 3-5 consistent customers (well, you only REALLY NEED one customer), and you can generally keep customers and employees happy by responding quickly and doing what you say you'll do (aka not taking on work you can't handle) I'm confident I could branch out on my own if I ever wanted to.

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

#109

Post by hcfman »

Melatonic wrote: post #33
codezero wrote: post #3

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 t…

Use " Solutions architect " maybe instead ?

That's a different role. It's made up of different words. Just like "Architect of solutions", yet another mystery role :-)

So long as he moves up a grade and is happy, everybody wins.

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

#110

Post by NoSalt »

dilyevsky wrote: post #79
NoSalt wrote: post #15

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 like writing code ... ONLY! Boy do I have some bad news for you...

And what would that news be? I have successfully doing this for almost 20 years. Yes, it means fewer promotions and less money, but I don't care. I value my sanity over money.
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