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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

#31

Post by Apofis »

marcyb5st wrote: post #10
esafak wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share one such puzzle?

I am a solution engineer mostly on the traditional ML side of things but have good knowledge of K8S/GKE. The most fun I had last year was helping a customer serve their models at scale. They thought it was cost prohibitive (500k inferences/second and a hard requirement of 7ms at p99) and so they were basically serving from a cache which was lossy (the combinatorial explosion of features made it so that to have full c…

Are they paying you as well as your comment makes it sound? That was a ton of lingo and I'm used to lingo!

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

#32

Post by jpollock »

antonvs wrote: post #30
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…

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

In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is the hardware working, is the network working?) was separate, and had different metrics.

Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals.

Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?

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

#33

Post by Melatonic »

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 ?

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

#34

Post by jameshush »

lateral_cloud wrote: post #7

Best job in the world.

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 level above your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers, you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.

Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team, and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference thing.

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

#35

Post by booleandilemma »

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!

Same thing happened to me at a company several years ago. It felt like they wanted me in two roles but were only paying me for one. Didn't take long for me to jump ship after that.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by codezero »

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 title has long been used as a post sales analyst (custom work for $)

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

#38

Post by jeron »

antonvs wrote: post #29
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?

devops means a lot of different things to different people

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

#39

Post by cootsnuck »

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 that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to deploy, etc. but deals with clients.

I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those roles if you're wanting a role focused almost entirely on post-sales.

(I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the director of research at his company and has had to wear a "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)

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

#40

Post by cootsnuck »

jameshush wrote: post #34
lateral_cloud wrote: post #7

Best job in the world.

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 times for a variety of clients across industries. Again though, totally depends on the company.

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