I spent 8 years doing Java development, layoffs are coming soon (my second time this year! 😊), I know how hard it is to get a job out there, and I’m tired of Java. So I was wondering if anyone had any advice for pointing my career in a new direction. I’d like there to be some technical aspect to it still, which is why I am posting here instead of elsewhere.
Right now I’m really into Lua, Vue.js, and am considering picking up CompTIA and AWS certifications just to make myself more marketable.
I have good people skills too, so if a career involves talking more than coding I’ll be okay with that. I spent part of this year teaching programming and loved it (but due to the state of the industry many academic businesses are closing down).
Or you know, should I sell my home and just go live in the woods until I die of malnutrition because at this rate we’ll all end up there anyways?
If you have both people and technical skills you’d be a good Sales/Customer Engineer. Basically you talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to, either before or after sales. You give demos, assist with support issues, and generally keep them happy. Some companies even let these folks give training classes. And a lot of the jobs are remote.
Is “customer engineer” another way of saying “business analyst”? I was always super grateful for the guys that spoke both normie and geek. “Hey so I talked to the unwashed masses yesterday and bla bla bla entity framework bla bla sql server bla bla rolling average 14-day lookback foreign key yada yada yada.” “Ah! Makes sense now.”
Naw. I always think of customer engineer as having a large overlap with the person who quotes you a price for some project (building, car repair, etc).
They look at what you need and try to figure out how to use their companies software to make it happen. But the critical difference is they don’t really build anything other than a demo or proof of concept. They might spec out something and give you a cost estimate. Or they might work with you to architect some piece (as in “hey you could use s3 here and dynamodb there and make sure that you don’t have a single region point of failure”.
At the end of the day it is sales. It’s just trying to show people they can use your companies tools to do what they want.
Also I work for one of the cloud companies. I spent most of my career as a software engineer but the most common skill I use is really more devops stuff. Customers aren’t asking me to design their business logic, they are often asking me to design their multi region high availability story.
Sales engineers work on the pre-sales side and there’s a bit of sales in it. But, at least at companies I’ve worked at, customer engineer are more about solving problems and getting the most out of whatever they bought.
I always tried to be honest, to the point where I would tell customers if they don’t need something or if something else would be a better fit, much to the chagrin of the sales people.
Interesting, I’ll definitely keep this in mind thank you!