I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing
infisical.com92 points by vmatsiiako 9 hours ago
92 points by vmatsiiako 9 hours ago
My path went from engineering-aligned (math) to engineering management back to engineering to product to program management to solutions engineering to account executive.
Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So that's a weird feeling.
One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to both real users and unique environments is important for their growth and novelty in the job.
Sales is amazing but if your companies sales people require engineering to build POCs a lot of the times or always have to sell some custom solutions, then it wastes a lot of resources and it usually indicates the company is losing product market fit.
That is true. My current work is in bespoke environments with mainly non-technical buyers who have been burned in the past. Our POCs are pretty minor lifts to build credibility and have worked extremely well.
If you're working in SaaS or commodity products and have to run POCs a lot, you're totally correct.
I love hearing this.
My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now running a solo consulting business.
I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding different/better ways to communicate.
In what industries did these roles happen? Same industry/domain or have you changed that as well?
Domain is all government, but the tech is different across each of them.
I love talking too, part of why I think pre-sales is a lot of fun. And I actually love my CRM work from a data perspective, but my background is in synthesizing data and optimization. Once I turned my sales process into a network optimizing problem, it became extremely interesting to me and imperative to keep the data current.
Fair point. I too like the data side of CRM. So many interesting possibilities.
Did you always enjoy talking or did you discover it at some point prior to your current sales role?
Can you share one such puzzle?
I am a solution engineer mostly on the traditional ML side of things but have good knowledge of K8S/GKE. The most fun I had last year was helping a customer serve their models at scale. They thought it was cost prohibitive (500k inferences/second and a hard requirement of 7ms at p99) and so they were basically serving from a cache which was lossy (the combinatorial explosion of features made it so that to have full coverage you needed exabytes of ram) and was stale prone. We focused on the serving first. After their data scientists trained a New pytorch model (small one, 50k parameters more or less) we compiled to onnx (as the model is small and CPU inference is actually faster), grafted the preprocessing layers to the model so that you never leave the ONNX C++ runtime (to avoid python), and deployed it to GKE. A 8 core node using AMD genoa cpus managed to get 25k/inferences per second. After a bit of fiddling with Numa affinity, GKE DNS replication, Triton LRU caches and few other things we managed to hit 30k inferences per second. If you scale up to the traffic it would cost them few thousands per month, which is less than their original cache approach.
Now they are working on continuous learning so that they can roll out new model (it is a very adversarial line of business and the models get stale in O(hours)). For that part I only helped them design the thing, no hands on. It was a super fun engagement TBH
> But for me, it was missing something I didn't know how to name until I found it: the chance to be technical and connected.
I genuinely throught this was impossible for a very long time. In my SWE roles I’ve mostly felt disconnected and isolated.
I resigned from my last dev job and started working in donut and coffee shops. I loved it.
I’m pursuing Support Engineer roles now hoping it will provide the human focus that was missing prior.
The part about interacting with people really resonates with me. I went from a support and repair position to a SWE role. It should have been great. But I burned out really quickly because the contributions I was making were going off into a void (from my perspective). I didn't see our customers engaging with what we built so I had almost zero job satisfaction.
I moved into another support role sort of by accident when I really wanted a sysadmin job but didn't have the years of experience needed to get through the door. I found out (again, by accident) that engaging with our customers directly gave me the feedback and sense of accomplishment that I was missing. I now know that it's an essential component for me. I'm much happier having figured that out.
Can relate a lot. I started off as a SWE but am pursuing a support role for similar reasons.
I really loathe that sales engineers stole the term Solutions Engineer which was previously used to basically mean support/services engineer (technical generalist), a mostly post-sales role. It's pedantic, but I watched it happen in real time, my company's HR even asked if we could change our team titles to help out the sales team since they wanted the more appealing title to use.
The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.
Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!
I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. It just happens to be a wider spectrum of things vs their usual "write YAML" in that 1 role. Sounds like the original poster found a more enjoyable role with the same title?
I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/120-skills-i-use-in-an-sre-pl.... I do agree, it is fun to mix it up in your day to day (IMO).
> I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work.
This is very, very wrong. Why do you think that?
Nope. Devops != any sort of pre-sales/post-sales/solution engineering.
It requires a more holistic, generalist view, and a degree of customer understanding, empathy, management and conversational skills well beyond typical devops.
Wow, I think I’d love this job. Nothing more interesting than learning about lots of different unique problems from different industries. And totally get the fear of losing technical edge
Word of warning: at some companies “solutions engineer” just means “demo monkey.” The sales people don’t really know how the product works or how to use it, so you are brought in to do the demo and answer questions and that’s about it (and you’re compensated much less well than the sales people).
It's always nice when the customer wants to improve the process/product, it can overcome internal friction that had prevented making things better.
Inspiring article. Well written. Totally feeling it!
My experience in a “product company” - Pre-sales solutions engineer - the original problem solver. Professional services - post-sales firefighter :)
I am a software developer. I went to college to learn software development. Two years ago, they tried to tack DevOps on to my job description. I told them "no thanks", then had to find another job. I found one and am MUCH happier not having to do that DevOps crap. No offense, but it a soul-draining undertaking, and I like writing code ... ONLY!
I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team.
Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain.
Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain.
Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain!
The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control.
However, I think the author and I have different opinions on what DevOps is. DevOps isn't a full time role. It's what the engineer does to get their software into production.
This sounds very adversarial to me. I’m glad our devops team doesn’t think like you.
The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice
I think there are different definitions of DevOps.
I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps).
DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized.
In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it.
Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like:
if (should_never_happen) {
log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again");
}
> The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill.
IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.
DevOps is secretly spiral development.
Great if billing by the hour, and mostly unsustainable for products =3
Best job in the world.