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Ask HN: Technical Sales Engineer
I'm interested in finding out if any HNers have ever been (or are currently) a technical sales engineer for a technology company operating in the (broad) IT space?
I'm specifically interested in your experience transitioning out from behind the monitor to a customer facing role. What were the challenges you faced? Do you have any advice for those considering making a similar move?
If you consider yourself an introvert it would be especially interesting to me to hear how you learned to step outside your comfort zone into an extroverted role.
- alnayyir 16y agoI'm pretty sure most HN members are going to transition from being an engineer to being a founder more often than not. You've got a bit of a mismatch in your choice of crowd to ask this. To be honest, I wouldn't take someone who switched to sales from engineering all that seriously to begin with. Call me provincial, I don't care.
- hunterjrj 16y agoIt would be interesting to see a breakdown of the types of users here on HN. My suspicion is that this place has far fewer founders (or people who will make the jump to becoming a founder) than it does just plain old smart people looking for intelligent discussion. Someone in this community has done what I'm asking about, guaranteed.
- alnayyir 16y ago>My suspicion is that this place has far fewer founders (or people who will make the jump to becoming a founder) than it does just plain old smart people looking for intelligent discussion. I'd tend to agree. I'm still not going to take the described transplant seriously.
- jeffffff 16y agowhen it comes to starting a company, being a good salesperson is far more important than engineering expertise. i've considered switching just to be more well rounded. most software startups aren't actually trying to do anything difficult. they need designers, salespeople, and marketing, not phd computer scientists.