I went to pre-sales engineering. Had to explain the value of technology to customers, answer questions regarding integration technology with existing systems, a

I went to pre-sales engineering. Had to explain the value of technology to customers, answer questions regarding integration technology with existing systems, and building labs based on their existing architecture. So not very different from what I was doing prior to the switch. Also you get to see all types of good (and bad) infrastructure. It was a lot of fun, but left very little time for building (the labs part was a lot of regurgitation, existing built labs and checking boxes in a frontend i built to deploy common services found in enterprise environments). You spend a lot of time in front of customers, so your verbal and written communications need to be on point. If you are juggling multiple projects, then you need to be able to context switch quickly and offload work to other teams (if you are working with a large organization -- i was working in smaller shops, so I was the person I offloaded my stuff onto -- hello 70-80 hour work weeks) The pay is great and its a good way to leapfrog yourself if you're trying to startup a project, but the travel is soul crushing and I stopped after a year to be with my children. The pay is really really great. The only time I've made a FAANG salary working for relatively no-name companies Also to add, it was very hard to stop saying 'No' to questions that were an obvious No. Like one time I had to build out a lab using popular networking gear and a new software product that both claimed to integrate with k8s, however the network gear didn't support older versions of k8s and the software product only supported older versions of k8s. My boss told me that i could not say 'No' and to get it done. So I smoke-and-mirrored a demo where one day I showed network+k8s integration and another day k8s+software product integration. Never both together. It felt icky, but no one asked to see both and in the next release k8s was supported (before we got to the implementation phase). Sales people always say Yes, Engineers always say No. Pre-sales engineers say "Yes, And..."