by nunez | 2026-02-07 07:29:17+00:00
I made the jump into SE (sales/solution engineering) three years ago after a long career as a SRE/systems/software engineer (the kind that found any excuse to break out ilspy, windbg, gdb and/or tcpdump on the job) and have a love-hate relationship with it.

This is a long post, but SEs are underrepresented here despite us being a big part of the sky high valuations that many companies on here have gotten, and it's a job that is still somehow not well known or understood.

I LOVE the travel. As someone whose happy place is seat 20F on a United 738 and a rental EV waiting on the other side, the random travel requests give me so much life. I enjoyed the 4 on, 3 off travel life as a consultant as well, but being asked to fly in for a meeting or two and get time to myself the day before is so much better. In fact, this is probably THE reason why I haven't gone back into the FTE world. Travel budgets for engineers are generally pithy.

I LOVE not having to answer to a Jira backlog. I can (and do) still ship PRs back to product if it makes sense for the customers I'm supporting, but my performance comp isn't tied to that. Interestingly enough, we are also not forced to use AI when coding for the same reason (though using it to understand what our customers are being increasingly asked to use is important, so I do sometimes).

Speaking of comp, I LOVE how transparent our comp packages are. The base salary is usually competitive with a high Senior/low Staff SWE, but unlike these roles, we don't get very many RSUs. What we do get is commission. The more we sell, the more we make. No black box bonus pool allocation nonsense. Some SEs can take in Staff+ total comp some years if they and their AE close a whale of a deal because of this. What's better about comp as an SE is that it's usually not regional. This makes the position super lucrative for engineers in LCOL/MCOL cities who don't mind getting on a plane every so often.

We also get a lot of time and space to tinker with the products we're selling when we're not out in the field (since we usually have to know them front to back; it's not uncommon for SEs to know more about a product than engineering or even Product). Most good SE managers will absolutely support you blocking off time to build, which is awesome!

Interviews are also WAY more than chill than those for SWE. No LC grinds. The hardest part is usually the tech panel (which is easy if you're good at presenting and explaining technical things in an accessible way).

So now onto the not so fun parts.

You are usually tied to a non-technical account executive (salesperson). The nature of that role attracts lots of...interesting people. Your entire existence as an SE hinges on how well you get along with your AE. A great relationship makes SE the best job in the world. Anything else makes it somewhere between a slog and hell on earth.

This is also a sales job at the end of the day. There's lots of talking and socializing involved. Not nearly as much as an AE, but doing happy hours and dinners sometimes comes with the job. As a massive introvert who often wants nothing more than to read Hacker News over a nice beer in sweet solitude at the end of an intense workday, you can probably imagine how draining these events can be.

Then there are the demos and POCs: the bread and butter of the role. Depending on where you are, you might be giving the same demo handfuls of times per day. These can be made more fun by working in investigative questions about the customer you're presenting to to learn more about them and why they need what you're selling (also called "discovery"), but some AEs won't give you that space. Feeling like your job is replaceable isn't great (even though it's not replaceable at all!)

There also isn't much upward mobility in this vertical. You can go a lot of places OUTSIDE the SE track given the cross-cutting nature of the job (Product, CTO, AE, and even back into engineering are common paths), but scope as an SE is narrower than the SWE path, as, again, its a sales job. (That said, getting into the Principal SE track usually involves talking at big shows and brand building like writing books, skills that are very useful if you want a heavy hitting job elsewhere or want to be the kind of person that gets paid to keynote conferences).

Many of the thought leaders in the SE space are technical but have lost their edge. Many of them are closer to sales than engineering. Some literally sell their presales methodologies and don't do technical stuff anymore. Great if you want to move away from that career; less so if you don't. More engineering-biased people might feel out of place initially.

Skill atrophy is also very real, counter to OPs observations. You can get away with minimal learning once you know what you're doing and have your demos locked in. It takes a while to get to this point, but once you're there, you can give a demo point blank a any time and are familiar enough with your product to lead a POC start to finish without blinking. This combined with not having time to "deep" learn due to meetings, demos and POCs can lead to skills slipping away.

Finally, that time to tinker can be hard to get if you're in a patch of heavy sales activity. This is felt the hardest when you join a new org and are sent into the field straightaway. This is often why so many SEs are usually former consultants of that product or ex-customers: shorter ramp-up time.

This can make it difficult to get back into a pure engineering role if SE doesn't work out. You won't have enough day to day experience to make hiring managers feel comfortable in bringing you on, which is a massive disadvantage in this market.

All in all, it's an awesome and somewhat safe career path that is a front row seat to how the money comes in, but it's heavily situational and probably not a fit for more introverted folks.