> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with. They’d have deep…
Before that, I worked in a digital print organisation with a factory site. This factory did huge volumes on a daily basis. It was full of machines. They had built up a tech base over years, decades, and it was hyper-optimised - woe betide any dev who walked into the factory thinking they could see an inefficiency that could be refactored out. It happened multiple times - quite a few devs, myself included, learned this lesson the hard way - on rare occasion thousands of lines of code had to be thrown out because the devs hadn't run it past the factory first.
It's an experience I'd recommend to any dev - build software for people who are not just "users" of technology but builders themselves. It's not as "sexy" as building consumer-facing tech, but it is so much more rewarding.