I'm a former SE. I was unhappy working in different "Engineering" roles for non-tech companies and got a job in the post sales services group of a large softwa

I'm a former SE. I was unhappy working in different "Engineering" roles for non-tech companies and got a job in the post sales services group of a large software company selling Analytics products. I was identified by management as having a blend of good customer facing + technical skills and was recruited into a more technical PreSales team. I was not sure about switching to PreSales, but I wasn't very happy with the heavy travel requirements of services so I switched. After close to a decade of customer facing work I got tired of it and left. It's a very long story, so I'll sum it up in the major reasons why I ultimately decided to leave. 1) I grew dissatisfied with basically being in constant MVP mode. The goal of PreSales is to convince a potential customer you can do something, not to actually do it. So you never really build something that goes into production. You never have the opportunity to learn from all the mistakes you made when you see it run for a year or more. Your sense of long-term ownership and mastery is very low. 2) SEs with strong technical skills are in a weird spot. Since your career trajectory is mostly evaluated by non-technical people, most people can't recognize when you do something amazing. You're in a sales org and above your PreSales manager is usually Sales Mangers. There's limited rewards for being technical. The rewards only come from selling. 3). There's no real career path for SEs. Unless you want to do the same job for the rest of your life, you need to move out of PreSales. At every company I've worked and known about, the titles (Associate, Consultant, Senior, Principal) are largely superficial and mean nothing other than your leverage when you are hired. I've known Associate Consultants with 0 experience who were better at PreSales than Principal consultants with 15+ years of experience. 4) I got really tired of sales people. A few of them are amazing and see PreSales as a precious finite resource that you need to take care of. Most see everything and everyone as disposable as long as their needs are met. At my last SE job the sales team was a bunch of toxic a-holes who would blatantly lie to the customer and then just turn around and task PreSales and Engineering to figure out how to make it work. There was no sense of "team" at all. As far as $$$, I think Engineering and Data Science (my field) jobs have reached the point where you are paid the same as PreSales or just a bit less. This was different in the past. The big money is in Sales, not in PreSales. I will always value the broad exposure I got to all levels (from ICs to C-Suite) at our customers. All of it was a great experience in climbing out of the technical weeds and really understanding what the customer was trying to do and why they were trying to do it. Learning to enjoy building (by osmosis, nobody taught me) a good slide deck and presenting it is something I value highly.