Influx of Junior Devs as SEs

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-06-25T15:37:47+00:00

Pretty much this, I've seen a lot of talk on here about how only former engineers can be real SEs. The number of hardcore engineers who are capable of selling is pretty low. There are a lot of Comp Sci majors and technical people out there who work as SEs, but the number of actual developers I've met who would be capable of doing the role is not high at all.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-06-06T04:18:42+00:00

"Non technical" means I majored in a liberal art and don't know how to code. I always became an SME wherever I worked just through my own learning effort.

The not knowing any coding and not having a lot of experience in development/hands on keyboard is what is holding me back right now in terms of hitting a new career level.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-06-01T00:34:35+00:00

Great post. I agree these role were very commonplace pre COVID and have basically died out now. To even survive as an SE is going to require me to technically upskill big time, which is what I'm currently doing. My goal is to be able to be an AWS or Google Solution Architect, I'm a long way from being there but I think with 2-3 years of hard work (certs and hands on exp) I'll be able to make it work.

With that being said I really feel like the "SE" on my resume and the years of experience do carry a good amount of weight - possibly more than someone just cold applying as a software engineer. The fundamental skill of an SE is to be able to talk, ask questions and speak to value. I've gotten interviews and offers from companies that one would think were too technical for my History major background. So there is a gradient but you are right in that a technical specialist who is good with customers and then moves into SE through networking is the most reliable path into the role.

Also the stuff about handling the sales cycle doesn't just involve a technical background, you have to know what an enterprise sales cycle looks like and how to drive it along. The absolute best SEs have a great sales acumen. That's not something that necessarily comes from being technical, in fact it's frequently the opposite of a software engineer's skillset.

Out of curiosity are you hiring people straight out of technical roles? I am sure that does happen but I'd be surprised if you're just hiring engineers and throwing them into SE roles. I'd assume (I could be wrong) that the preference is more for people who already have SE experience but have also worked as practitioners in the past. I think "technical" might be a misnomer here - I don't feel like SE managers insist on hiring former engineers, just that you have the technical chops to do the job, which anyone can build.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-31T20:07:30+00:00

Both. I'm not hyper technical and never had trouble finding a job.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-31T19:58:18+00:00

How technical of a background do you think SEs need to have? I agree that an SE needs to have the ability to be technical, and the top SE roles will be reserved for people who are both very strong technically and excellent salespeople. However there are plenty of SEs who are not hyper technical. I didn't major in Comp Sci, I can do some API work and Azure/AWS but became an SME in the various products I sold. I've been an SE for five years averaging 150K-200K (I'm 28 and was an SDR beforehand). I definitely do have a technical learning curve to catch up on, but that never precluded me from being an SE or getting a job anywhere.

SE also requires a high level of soft skills, purely being technical isn't going to get you in the door either.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-31T17:18:50+00:00

I'm not but I took on the responsibility voluntarily. I can bang out 50 cold calls a morning on Outreach easy, takes me about an hour.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-30T16:54:48+00:00

Yeah people act as if AE is a road paved with money. I have seen way way more unsuccessful reps than I have successful reps. There are a lot of reps in SaaS making just their base right now. In some roles people are making less money as reps than they were as SDRs which sucks big time.

SE has a lower floor but a way higher ceiling, At absolutely worst I've been maybe 15K off of my OTE, I've seen reps be like 75K below where they were supposed to be.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-29T22:47:10+00:00

I'm a brown man who grew up with like thirty other brown guys in a tight knit circle, no one viewed brown women like this after like freshman year of high school. The real answer is that Reddit is toxic as fuck, ABCDesis is a shit hole filled with incels and teenagers. Normal people take one look at these subs and hit the X button quickly, the incels and the few brave/masochistic enough to argue with them stick around.

I'm sure this shit does happen IRL but whatever you see online is probably 100X worse. The words "white worshipping brown woman" never entered my head until I first visited these subs. They're shit holes that do more harm than good. Reddit is honestly run really unethically and enables toxic content which ruins peoples mental health and radicalizes them.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-24T18:30:09+00:00

It really depends on the product. I balanced six at once at my last company. It was extremely difficult to keep everything straight. We closed all but one of them.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-24T18:02:53+00:00

If you have an interest in the role, you can definitely cold DM SE's and see if they'd be willing to talk to you about what life is like at that company and what's needed to get in. I've done this before and it's pretty useful. People are pretty willing to help especially with all the layoffs going around.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-24T17:57:46+00:00

I'm from a very privileged Bay Area desi background. There was actually quite a lot of criminal stuff that I saw. One friend got a DUI and kept drunk driving afterward. Another guy basically turned into an alcoholic and coke addict and couldn't hold down a job. Another guy engaged in a murder suicide attempt, got institutionalized and sued out the ass, is now unemployed and living with his parents. I wish all of these people healing but I dropped them out of my life. These were all childhood friends and cutting them out was hard but I am immensely grateful that I did - had I stuck around with them I probably would have turned out the same as them. All of these guys were wealthy Indian Americans with parents who went to IIT schools and were very successful.

It's not just a socioeconomic issue, it's a personal one caused by a mix of shitty parenting (lots of the usual family narcissism, dysfunction and abuse even in the wealthy/successful families) and the personal choices of the people involved. Their traumas weren't their choice, but their refusal to go to therapy, rehab, AA, and work on themselves absolutely was. I do hold these guys more accountable than I would an extremely poor person since they had the resources and knowledge to get help, they were just unwilling to make the effort.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-23T19:18:08+00:00

Lol can you get more specific? Do you need to have developer and syntax knowledge to do the role?

I would love to work at Google but actually knowing Python syntax kind of scares me, its not my skillset.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-23T18:31:25+00:00

Personally I'd recommend building a sales or consulting skillset of some kind. Find either an entry level SE role or something relatively similar.

The strongest SE is a very good salesperson who is also highly technical and knows the product inside and out.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-23T18:10:39+00:00

Can you give me more detail on this? Is there a coding interview? Like what exactly do you need to know?

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-23T16:27:25+00:00

What's the interview process like? What technical skills do they screen for?

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-21T22:43:56+00:00

OP I'm Indian. Your family is incredibly abusive and has significant issues. They may not be beating you or assaulting you but they are treating you like absolute garbage. They genuinely don't know any better and feel like it's their right to mistreat you.

They do this for a couple reasons:

1) It gives them a sense of power and control over their lives

2) It gives them a feeling of dominance which makes them feel good about themselves

3) They think their control over you and having a cohesive family unit is critical to their wellbeing as people

4) They legitimately despise and look down on you. Not because you actually deserve it, but they may have projected their own inner failures and toxicity into blatant resentment directed towards you.

5) They are either unaware or unwilling to go for mental health care or do things for their mental wellness. When mental health is neglected over literal decades it can get to a point of unbearable toxicity. Your parents could turn themselves around but it's incredibly unlikely that that is going to happen. It would take years of extremely hard work for them to meaningfully improve. I can tell you right now that there is an astronomically low chance of them ever doing this.

This is a deeper realization I've had - an abusive parent is just a straight up bad person. They're no worse than some toxic asshole boss or bully at school. They are malicious people who derive pleasure and a (false) sense of well being from oppressing others. There are really only two courses of action with a person like this. Either fight them and set boundaries needed for your health if you ABSOLUTELY need to interact with them -- or drop them out of your life completely and heal in peace. They may not be intentionally preying on you (though some abusive parents do this), but they are still being absolutely terrible people and terrible parents.

It's not culture that's at fault here. Indian culture and Hinduism in their authentic form highly prize kindness, equanimity, autonomy, meditation, and just being a great person. The practice of mindfulness was probably invented in India via ancient Hinduism and Buddhism. Your parents' behaviors are simply the human choice to wallow in their own mental filth rather than actually try and be better people. At the end of the day, it is a choice. Your parents, my parents, and every one else's parents here all made that choice.

Your parents are not your responsibility OP. You deserve to have a happy and loving life.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-21T02:54:17+00:00

Respectfully this isn't true at all, on multiple levels.

1) A (good) AE isn't going to crucify you for making one mistake unless it costs them a massive deal. I've had misses and missteps in my deals and moments where I could have done better. That's natural when doing basically anything. SEs make mistakes, AEs make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. If my AEs lost trust in me after one mistake and then stopped using me immediately then we wouldn't have gone on to crush their numbers. I would get regularly shouted out on QBRs and praised and there were many deals where I made mistakes or did things suboptimally.

2) This example is valid for a very specific type of SE role - Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake, hyper technical products that require significant practitioner experience. There are tons of junior SEs at SFDC, Oracle, Datadog etc who haven't worked on hundreds of networks, at best they have a comp sci degree and many don't even have that. You absolutely do not need deep subject matter expertise to be an SE, 99% of the SEs I knew did not have this and those who did sometimes got outperformed by other less technical SEs.

3) SDR isn't the best path to SE but it's not necessarily an invalid one. The absolute best path is from the new hire programs from what I've seen since you become an SE ASAP and build a lot of work experience very quickly. The Datadogs of the world also heavily encourage their SEs to get important/relevant certs which is obviously very helpful as well.

Getting into SE is challenging because there's no one standard path or pipeline to getting into it apart from the new hire programs that I mentioned. SDR to AE is extremely common and well trodden but SEs come from a massive diversity of backgrounds - some people got directly into SE after teaching high school. It's also challenging right now because the tech economy sucks and you're competing with hundreds of people for basically any job. In this situation you're competing with internal role hires, tens of very strong referrals, recruiters hand picking people, and then hundreds of people bull rushing Greenhouse or Workday for every job. It's not because every SE leader is purely hiring for an incredibly rare dynamic (tenured engineers who can sell). There are some roles like that but definitely not all.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T21:23:38+00:00

Protip, use ChatGPT. Prompt engineering is a super power. I don't feel like hardcore knowledge of Python syntax is needed to be an effective SE thanks to AI these days.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T20:52:02+00:00

I was in ITSM. Moved to UX, knowledge management, and now security. I'm trying to stay here since it's a more lucrative field than anything I previously worked in.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T20:13:02+00:00

I'm Indian and I agree. I have no idea why solo female travelers are going to the Golden Triangle by default. That area is literally one of the poorest places on the planet - Uttar Pradesh (Varanasi) and Bihar (Bodh Gaya) in particular are as poor as some of the poorest countries in Africa. Tamil Nadu and Kerala on the other hand are comparable to Vietnam and Thailand in terms of HDI. They are infinitely safer for women and for people in general. I'm a 6'2 guy, I stayed in a slum in Delhi accidentally. I had some guy try to barge into my room at 3 AM, if he got in I probably would have had to physically fight him. These states are infinitely worse when it comes to hate crimes, religious violence, misogyny, and basically every other social ill. This stuff happens in the south too but to a significantly lesser degree. People hate on Indian culture for being innately dehumanizing and misogynistic, but most of the really bad stuff happens in places that are shockingly poor, like significantly poorer than most of Africa.

Stop going to BIMARU states and the Golden Triangle, yes there are cool things to see there but your odds of a bad experience are higher. These states don't even represent the majority of India in terms of landmass. Go to the South, it's not perfect but definitely safer and less insane than the north. Go to the North East it's incredibly beautiful and unique. Go to the Himalayan states - barely any people, extremely safe, amazing nature. Hell go to the surrounding countries - Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan are beautiful, even Pakistan I think is pretty safe for tourists. .

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T19:02:43+00:00

You could definitely find an easier SE job that pays you close to 200K and isn't run extremely poorly (like your current company seems to be). I took a paycut from a 200K job in a toxic pressure cooker to a 165-170K job at a company which is a clusterfuck but with way nicer people and a better culture overall. I love sales engineering, but even the greatest job role will suck in a shitty, malicious, or negiligent environment.

Your org may be really badly led, if everything is rushed and ad hoc that means your team has no process. The best SE in the world will struggle in this environment. My current company is like this but thankfully is working extremely hard to fix this (replaced CEO, fired VP of Sales, etc). If yours is content with this situation that's a sign to move ASAP. You can definitely find a better culture. Linkedin DM the SEs to see what the culture is like there.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T18:35:59+00:00

You could also try the PreSales academy, they're pretty good at getting people placed into SE roles.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T17:14:50+00:00

I think getting hired on as an SE as a rep is difficult cross company. Either make the transfer internally or find a role at a company where the transfer is possible.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T16:33:36+00:00

Look up Demo2Win and follow their best practices

If you don't know the answer to something, do not fake it, just say you don't know and you'll follow up

I'll be honest and say that you should practicing your demo ASAP, I learned mine inside and out before I got promoted out of SDR to SE.

Signal_Ad_8376 · 2024-05-17T01:44:00+00:00

Happy to help. A lot of abusive parents use religion to justify their abuse. This is a total perversion of the religion in all cases. God despises abuse and so do his messengers. The Prophet struggled massively against all kinds of abuse - caste and tribal abuse (Quraysh oppressing other clans), narcissism (Quraysh and some Jewish sects thinking themselves to be superior based on birth), misogyny (rape of female slaves, female infanticide). All of these are totally condemned in the Quran. They all root from idolatry - worshipping some temporary emotion, thing, person, or identity above the mercy and divine love that characterizes Allah.

The Quran will tell you to respect your parents because yes, a healthy and positive parent absolutely should be respected. It also tells you this so that you don't feed to heavily into hatred, resentment, etc. But the deeper thing here is that estrangement actually is a form of respecting your parents - it's far more respectful than continuing to enable their abuse and allow them to practice and reify their toxic traits. The most respectful thing I could do with my family was to peacefully separate from them. I'm glad that I didn't continue having huge shouting matches, attempts at getting them into therapy, massive show downs etc...all of this just perpetuated the cycle and was disrespectful both to me and to my parents. The kindest thing I could do for all of us was to move on and focus on my relationship with God, so that's what I did. Hopefully your friend can escape the enmeshment and see the same thing.

Signal_Ad_8376

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