I'm in a similar situation, with a few kinks: I'm in Europe (where skilled developers are seen as prize cattle), did a few years of management (which were OK) a

I'm in a similar situation, with a few kinks: I'm in Europe (where skilled developers are seen as prize cattle), did a few years of management (which were OK) and made the horrible mistake of going into post-sales at a US multinational. My days are filled with e-mails, meetings with customers, PowerPoint decks and discussions about product features, and even though I'm in what passes for a senior "technical" position all people care about are sales quotas and bonus targets and my manager is clearly incompetent to run a technical team - all he cares about is making quota. Lots of lip service towards customer satisfaction and ethical selling, but mostly passing the buck onto other teams and partners. I do get around a lot, which includes getting a lot of face time with interesting people I might not otherwise have met if I'd stuck to a development role and do a fair amount of cool demos (whenever I'm given enough time to prepare) but the agony of not being able to build stuff and just pushing prepackaged solutions onto a customer is driving me nuts. Pay is OK (slightly less than what I made as a manager, but with a bigger, utterly impossible to reach bonus), I get to work from home, free trips to the HQ, etc. the tech is good enough, and improving. But what irks me is the baseline, unspoken attitude of "sell and be done with it". I'm respected for my technical skills outside the company but constantly grilled about closing the sale (even when the customer doesn't want or need what we sell - which is one of the current trendy things in our industry) so I, for one, would very much like to go back to a development role. Let this be a cautionary tale of sorts - sales might seem like an easy half-way position towards something else, but there is more than one kind of intellectual burnout.