Offering a developer the option to go into sales is like telling an author that (s)he should stop wasting all this time writing books and get into the sales dep

Offering a developer the option to go into sales is like telling an author that (s)he should stop wasting all this time writing books and get into the sales department of the publishing company -- regardless of the quality of their writing. Developers can have very high stress jobs (in critical infrastructure software, which there is a great deal of, software bugs kill people). The hours you put in in as a developer in a start-up shop is mind boggling. Developers often have to invest months (or years) of time and effort before their work can come out as a product, and their value is exceptionally hard to quantify. EDIT: sorta, rewrote most of it.