I was a straight-up software engineer and switched over to being a sales engineer. I was in the enterprise space, and wanted to understand our customers because

I was a straight-up software engineer and switched over to being a sales engineer. I was in the enterprise space, and wanted to understand our customers because frankly, I had no idea WTF they were doing. It was fun. If you're single, young, and technical, being an SE is great. You get to talk about your product and how it'll help them, and help people get onboarded and make your product work. You get to see and learn a tremendous amount of infrastructure, process, and products. By the end of an engagement you should know your customer's infrastructure and process better than they do (and we did - they called us for help with other departments). You also get to travel around and find all these great places to eat. If you're tier 3, though, you kind of go to the middle of nowhere which probably sucks a bit more. Being an SE is a great way to understand the sales process as well. Your role as an SE is to either get the technical stakeholders to say "yes" or to not say "no." You get to work with salespeople (who are pretty hilarious), sales managers/directors, and customers. The downside is that it gets boring after a few years. I worked on Tier 1 accounts, but after a while they all sort of look/sound the same...which they should, because at some point when managing a large infrastructure best practices tend to converge. Everyone that manages 100k servers tends to do the same thing, because it works. It helps down the road as well because you now have insight into IT's thought process. In a startup full of youngsters they have this bizarre (ie: wrong) idea of how software deployment works in the Real World. They need to be disabused of those notions, gently. You also get to understand the end-to-end of the software process. Sales is just the first step! There's implementation, support onboarding, training, etc. It's actually fun when it all comes together. And it mostly does come together. The thing you realize is that sales is hard work. And the crappy salespeople you see in real life are just that - crappy. At some level you realize that everyone in your organization needs to be customer-focused (ie:in sales), because they're paying the bills. Various large organizations have forgotten who their customers are, but for a small company it's imperative that everyone (including software people) are totally customer-focused.