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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

#21

Post by alsetmusic »

The part about interacting with people really resonates with me. I went from a support and repair position to a SWE role. It should have been great. But I burned out really quickly because the contributions I was making were going off into a void (from my perspective). I didn't see our customers engaging with what we built so I had almost zero job satisfaction.

I moved into another support role sort of by accident when I really wanted a sysadmin job but didn't have the years of experience needed to get through the door. I found out (again, by accident) that engaging with our customers directly gave me the feedback and sense of accomplishment that I was missing. I now know that it's an essential component for me. I'm much happier having figured that out.

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

#22

Post by mikeocool »

maxaw wrote: post #6

Wow, I think I’d love this job. Nothing more interesting than learning about lots of different unique problems from different industries. And totally get the fear of losing technical edge

Word of warning: at some companies “solutions engineer” just means “demo monkey.” The sales people don’t really know how the product works or how to use it, so you are brought in to do the demo and answer questions and that’s about it (and you’re compensated much less well than the sales people).

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

#23

Post by ikjasdlk2234 »

grvdrm wrote: post #16
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…

I love hearing this. My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now running a solo consulting business. I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding different/better ways to communicate. In what industries did these roles hap…

Domain is all government, but the tech is different across each of them.

I love talking too, part of why I think pre-sales is a lot of fun. And I actually love my CRM work from a data perspective, but my background is in synthesizing data and optimization. Once I turned my sales process into a network optimizing problem, it became extremely interesting to me and imperative to keep the data current.

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

#24

Post by jpollock »

bobanrocky wrote: post #18
jpollock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team. Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain. Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain. Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain! The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control. However, I think the author and I…

The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice

I think there are different definitions of DevOps.

I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps).

DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized.

In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it.

Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like:

  if (should_never_happen) {
    log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again");
  }
Where the one who does do devops writes code that avoids the error condition entirely (usually possible), or decides what the code should do in that situation (not log).

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

#25

Post by esseph »

bobanrocky wrote: post #18
jpollock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team. Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain. Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain. Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain! The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control. However, I think the author and I…

The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice

> The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill.

IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.

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

#26

Post by grvdrm »

ikjasdlk2234 wrote: post #23
grvdrm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love hearing this. My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now running a solo consulting business. I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding different/better ways to communicate. In what industries did these roles hap…

Domain is all government, but the tech is different across each of them. I love talking too, part of why I think pre-sales is a lot of fun. And I actually love my CRM work from a data perspective, but my background is in synthesizing data and optimization. Once I turned my sales process into a network optimizing problem, it became extremely interesting to me and imperative to keep the data current.

Fair point. I too like the data side of CRM. So many interesting possibilities.

Did you always enjoy talking or did you discover it at some point prior to your current sales role?

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

#27

Post by meken »

alsetmusic wrote: post #21

The part about interacting with people really resonates with me. I went from a support and repair position to a SWE role. It should have been great. But I burned out really quickly because the contributions I was making were going off into a void (from my perspective). I didn't see our customers engaging with what we built so I had almost zero job satisfaction. I moved into another support role sort of by accident wh…

Can relate a lot. I started off as a SWE but am pursuing a support role for similar reasons.

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

#28

Post by meken »

> But for me, it was missing something I didn't know how to name until I found it: the chance to be technical and connected.

I genuinely throught this was impossible for a very long time. In my SWE roles I’ve mostly felt disconnected and isolated.

I resigned from my last dev job and started working in donut and coffee shops. I loved it.

I’m pursuing Support Engineer roles now hoping it will provide the human focus that was missing prior.

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

#29

Post by antonvs »

nickjj wrote: post #14

I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. It just happens to be a wider spectrum of things vs their usual "write YAML" in that 1 role. Sounds like the original poster found a more enjoyable role with the same title? I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at https://ni…

> I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work.

This is very, very wrong. Why do you think that?

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

#30

Post by antonvs »

jpollock wrote: post #17
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 have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team. Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain. Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain. Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain! The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control. However, I think the author and I…

This sounds very adversarial to me. I’m glad our devops team doesn’t think like you.
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