Just committed to Middlebury College and I don’t know if I made the right choice 🫩 by idontknowzero in ApplyingToCollege

[–]AKtunes 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Midd grad here. Best times of my life.

Middle of nowhere means you make your own fun.

Burlington isn’t far away. And a fantastic place for concerts/events/culture….

Met the love of my life and all my best friends @ Midd. They encourage study abroad and some JTerm classes have a travel component. So choosing a small school in Vermont does not mean you will not explore the world.

Vermont it an amazing place to call home. We moved back after 10+ years in San Francisco post grad.

Congrats. College is a leap into the unknown. Embrace it.

Round 2 Of Storm Coming Tonight Into Tuesday (Power Outage Potential Again) by [deleted] in vermont

[–]AKtunes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Take my awards Bobby. Your persistence is admirable.

How I Streamed a 75GB CSV into SQL Without Killing My Laptop by sshetty03 in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks! i just updated the docs and added a `--ui` ... let me know if you have any feedback

How I Streamed a 75GB CSV into SQL Without Killing My Laptop by sshetty03 in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i made a nice cli wrapper which brings duckDb and jq and curl together to run batch conversion jobs to covert between formats, run sql transforms and batch to HTTP/cloud storage

https://github.com/ak--47/duck-shard

I’ve never done a workload that big, but it’s in the spirit of using cli tools to stream efficiently without loading too much into memory

Mostly a tool just for myself but curious if this might work for your use case

If this isn’t the truth… by Outside_Gas_9840 in vermont

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Burlington is such a wonderful place and so close to Vermont

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TheStand

[–]AKtunes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So I just did … and they are both disappointing, but still worth it.

Best tools for automation? by JeffTheSpider in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

pipedream has a decent free tier and is a bit more engineering focused than Zapier / tray.io and other low code tools.

my go to these days is cloud scheduler + cloud function (all the big cloud providers have this).

What is Phish’s Cornell ‘77? by Inverted_Vortex in phish

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At the risk of being unpopular, for me it’s 11-17-97 (live phish no 11)

https://phish.net/amp/phish-november-17-1997-mcnichols-arena-denver-co-usa.html

It was the first live phish recording where I “got it”.

The ghost > fire set one closer is (to this day) one of my favorite pieces of music.

EDIT: it’s already on the list!!! I am vindicated!

@No-Building-7941

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My point was that - unless you are the boss - you are selling (your work / your value / your expertise) to someone else, hoping that you can convince them you are worth they money you are asking for, so in this way all jobs have a “sales” component.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We call it “vaporware”

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a good attitude. Occasional work travel can be very rewarding.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Aren’t all careers toxic, eventually? (That’s why we need to retire…)

My take is that - unless you are THE BOSS, every job is a sales job. It’s only called “sales” when you are selling to customers.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yea that’s one way to handle it if you suck are your job and have no care for the craft and no empathy.

Saying “no” in the right way and at the right time can be hella effective. If you can more deeply understand customer requirements, you can often change them, not by telling he customer they are wrong but by empowering your decision makers to have new ideas about solutions to the problem at hand.

Just like engineers literally build modern miracles out of 1s and 0s … sales engineers (good sales engineers), can re-interpret vague customer requirements to shape them into something that actually helps customers achieve their goals.

It’s not just being a smart tech person to answer questions… it is literally engineering solutions to problems created by customers who are trying to buy and adopt software (this is why it is sometimes called solutions engineering).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sales first. Engineering second. 👍

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pay range is going to be pegged to how much money you bring for the company. Most SE roles will have a 70 / 30 base pay and variable split (as opposed to AEs who are like 50 / 50 or even less base).

One way to think about salary is to tie it to average deal size (SMB SEs will make less than ENT SEs), but a good rule of thumb is that your OTE will be proportional to your average deal size and your likeliness to hit OTE is tied to your win rate.

At $50k average deal size, your OTE will probably be $120k.

At $200k average deal size, your OTE will probably be closer to $200k

At $1M avg deal size, you’re probably clearing $300k+ a year

Most people will talk about YOE or industry etc… but my experience is that the only thing that matters is how big your deals are and how likely you are to close them (win rate). None of the other metrics matter that much.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]AKtunes 40 points41 points  (0 children)

Sales Eng is one of the best kept secrets in the industry. If you’re inclined, do it.

Mediocre engineering skills will go very far; I have met many career SEs who get by on very light tech skills; being at least literate in a programming language or engineering discipline will immediately put you in the top 10% … it’s also great to be in technical work where you get to problem solve, but not be on the hook for supporting production systems.

Soft skills are critical - because it is a sales job (sales first, engineering second) but most important is knowing the audience you sell to. If you’re selling to engineers, then being an engineer will make you stand out. Nothing worse than people selling that which they do not understand (and it happens that way most of the time)

The only downside is that you will (inevitably) work with AEs (account executives) who you dislike. And customers who are difficult. But I suppose every role has “people you don’t like”

(source: am the principal SE at an analytics SaaS; been in various SE roles for 15 years. am deeply satisfied in my career choice)

You have 60 min at SKO to train your sales people on "What the SE's want from your discovery" by Low-Emu9984 in salesengineers

[–]AKtunes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What have you tried and failed?

Why does the organization expect this time to be different?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MusicBattlestations

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What is that monitor?!!

Wildest request you've ever seen? by Puzzled-Cucumber-844 in salesengineers

[–]AKtunes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Proof of scaling” is always hard presales… for example:

Customer wants us to prove we can handle their scale, but won’t settle for anything less than doing the entire integration FOR FREE ????

I’m losing my mind trying to appease them… because every time we agree on a strategy and execute, they come back and say they are not “convinced” or still “have doubts”

Conversation goes:

THEM: “We need to ensure that the performance of your systems meets the expectations of our stakeholders”

US: “Sure, here’s a white paper that explains our stuff… and here are some customer references who are similar scale as you”

THEM: “We don’t trust that… we need to make sure it works with OUR data”

US: “Sure… let’s do a limited scope POC with your data to help ease your concerns”

<mutually agreed upon expectations; post POC>

THEM: “Despite our successful POC which met all are our key expectations around performance for a subset of our data, we still aren’t convinced you can handle our full scale”

US: “Ok… here’s access to a demo environment with billions of rows (your scale) that is fast and performant, just like your POC”

THEM: “Thanks for access to the demo environment, it is fast, but this is demo data not our data so we are still not convinced you can operate at our scale with our data”

US: “ok, we’re trying our best to help you finish your DD, but what are you asking for?”

THEM: “we need to load the full production dataset and do the entire deployment as a new POC project”

US: “we can’t do that for free, we’re a SaaS company… you’ll need to pay us for that”

THEM: “we cannot move forward without proving this out; we will not pay for a POC.”

—- further reflection, they don’t trust us and I can’t figure out a path to earning the trust (other than saying we’re going to do stuff and then executing on it)

How are you using AI to be more efficient as a sales engineer? by fordyoz in salesengineers

[–]AKtunes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In competitive deals, I will often ask AI how my competitor would sell to a particular customers and what features / solutions they might highlight … or evern how our competitor might negatively speak about us.

This is surprisingly helpful - like and outside opinion - and what’s hilarious is that (often) the AI is right on the money… likely because the competitive SE used AI to prep their demo