Hm. I would say it's easy for either role to learn at the entry level. I am entirely confident that an engineer who had the desire to learn some business could

Hm. I would say it's easy for either role to learn at the entry level. I am entirely confident that an engineer who had the desire to learn some business could pick up the basics fairly easily, just as I am confident a business/sales person who had the desire to learn programming could pick it up fairly easily. But, it is no doubt just as difficult for the engineer to learn how to manage enterprise sized operations as it would be for the Sales guy to learn how to architect a complete system. In both cases a great deal of persistence and time is required--things often seem easy to us when we haven't really delved into them. As you really immerse yourself in a given field you begin to realize how much you don't know and the massive amount of things you can still learn.