[HN Gopher] I spent 5 years in DevOps - Solutions engineering ga...
___________________________________________________________________
I spent 5 years in DevOps - Solutions engineering gave me what I
was missing
Author : vmatsiiako
Score : 177 points
Date : 2026-02-06 16:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (infisical.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (infisical.com)
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| Can you share one such puzzle?
| marcyb5st wrote:
| 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
| Apofis wrote:
| Are they paying you as well as your comment makes it sound?
| That was a ton of lingo and I'm used to lingo!
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Yeah :) happy on the money front. I didn't mention this
| earlier, but I'm a Googler and my role is to make sure
| that big customers are as happy as possible on GCP. And
| Google still pays well (talking with my SWE friends my
| total comp lands around the middle of the pack, perhaps a
| bit fewer stock grants). I was a SWE (also at Google)
| before, so maybe they didn't change my comp too much in
| the new job family. I don't know as those things are
| mysterious.
|
| Also, not all projects are this fun. Sometimes is solving
| the same problem over and over or working with customers
| that aren't tech savvy and there is a bunch of
| politicking and "fluffy" stuff.
| falloutx wrote:
| 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.
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| Your company is selling the 'valet service' more than the
| products.
|
| There are people willing to pay for convenience AND
| security at the same time (hire someone else to manage the
| problem, and they're the 'key').
| virgilp wrote:
| I'm wondering about that. I think with the advent of AI, we
| might see a new kind of successful software company - one
| that doesn't sell a single solution to many customers, but
| instead has the building blocks, prompts (agents skills etc)
| & processes to quickly build very custom solutions for each
| customer - using a new blend of engineers that are not
| exactly "customer support" nor traditional "sw eng", but more
| around the emerging "forward-deployed engineer" role.
| jungturk wrote:
| Sometimes, but if your product is a platform (or anything
| beyond a niche solution in a broader problem domain) then
| you're going to spend some time showing people how to make it
| work best for them.
| grvdrm wrote:
| 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?
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| 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.
| grvdrm wrote:
| 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?
| robertcarter wrote:
| Would you be willing to tell me more about your path to account
| executive and sales? I am considering such a path myself and it
| would be wonderful to talk with someone whose done this.
| nunez wrote:
| I hope you like being on call and having to tell management
| why you're not hitting your number and "forecasting" your way
| to close the gap.
|
| I also hope you like golf! And drinking!
|
| There can be UNREAL amounts of drinking as an AE.
|
| You'll also be on a plane A LOT. The folks in suits and
| sneakers waiting first in line to board with their roller
| bags? Almost all of them are AEs.
|
| Most of your customers will see you as a walking credit card.
|
| You can also make 6+-figure commission checks and deep
| friendships if the deals are right, so there's that.
| mancerayder wrote:
| How do you get to sales from engineering? Must it take place
| laterally in the same company, or did you sell yourself
| differently to recruiters, or did you know someone?
| codezero wrote:
| 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!
| Melatonic wrote:
| Use " Solutions architect " maybe instead ?
| codezero wrote:
| That title has long been used as a post sales analyst (custom
| work for $)
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| At AWS at least, an SA is free for a client and ci e them
| advice - not allowed to give a customer code.
|
| ProServe consultants (full time employees) are never called
| SAs
| cootsnuck wrote:
| In my experience, it just entirely depends on the company.
| Different companies will use the same title and they can have
| wildly different mixtures of pre vs post sales involvement. My
| career has all been customer/client facing technical roles.
| Titles range from:
|
| - support engineer
|
| - solutions engineer
|
| - sales engineer
|
| - applied engineer
|
| - forward deployed engineer
|
| - solutions / sales architect
|
| - field engineer
|
| And that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an
| engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to
| deploy, etc. but deals with clients.
|
| I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused
| engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the
| sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be _too_ hard to avoid
| those roles if you 're wanting a role focused almost entirely
| on post-sales.
|
| (I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales
| dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into
| it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the
| director of research at his company and has had to wear a
| "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Top of the funnel should be pre-sales. Our sales folks are
| usually juggling eight or nine opportunities, trying to get
| contracts signed, in our case working with AWS to help get
| funding, flying to customers sites, etc.
|
| I am post sales, billable staff consultant who leads projects.
| I'm "delivery". I focus on one project at a time and dig deep
| into requirements and the implementation and/or strategy docs.
| bigtones wrote:
| Agreed - its total sales engineering as he described it.
| axus wrote:
| It's always nice when the customer wants to improve the
| process/product, it can overcome internal friction that had
| prevented making things better.
| maxaw wrote:
| 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
| vmatsiiako wrote:
| Apply here :) -
| https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/infisical/2ef2e211-9332-4e68-bd86-e...
| -
| https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/infisical/73b79555-8b3f-486b-84fa-8...
| mikeocool wrote:
| 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).
| lateral_cloud wrote:
| Best job in the world.
| jameshush wrote:
| 1000%. When the sale doesn't go through, it's the salesperson's
| fault. When the product doesn't work, it's the "real"
| engineer's fault. When everything works, the client gives you a
| high five.
|
| If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real"
| engineers.
|
| As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo
| kinda works during the call, you're 10/10.
|
| At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a level above
| your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level
| engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers,
| you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.
|
| Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this
| job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team,
| and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can
| focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference
| thing.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Yup, it is. It's my bread and butter too. So much so I
| decided to just do it for myself and start my own consulting
| company.
|
| Being a solutions engineer at the right companies means you
| get to be one of the few people with full end-to-end
| visibility of the entire lifecycle of both a client and the
| technology adoption, deployment, optimization, maintenance,
| etc. process. And you'll get to see it dozens or hundreds of
| times for a variety of clients across industries. Again
| though, totally depends on the company.
| bigtones wrote:
| Yes... and also it pays pretty damn well if your company sales
| team is winning. Incentives are aligned.
| pisipisipisi wrote:
| My experience in a "product company" - Pre-sales solutions
| engineer - the original problem solver. Professional services -
| post-sales firefighter :)
| korijn wrote:
| Inspiring article. Well written. Totally feeling it!
| nickjj wrote:
| 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).
| bobanrocky wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| > I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work.
|
| This is very, very wrong. Why do you think that?
| jeron wrote:
| devops means a lot of different things to different people
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If you are a "DevOps engineer" - how is what you are doing
| any different from operations folk 25 years ago if you
| aren't working with developers and embedded into their
| teams?
| antonvs wrote:
| Why are you assuming that devops engineers aren't
| embedded in development teams?
|
| The problem you're suffering from is assuming that the
| limited range of situations you're familiar with is the
| same as what everyone else is doing.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Rule #1 is never make assumptions about anyone on the
| internet...
|
| In the past 8 years I've led the architecture of a
| startup - cloud + app dev. Then spent almost 4 years
| working at AWS ProServe involved with large cloud + app
| dev "cloud application modernization" projects and now 2
| years doing the same as a staff level consultant at a 3rd
| party consulting firm. I think I've seen my fair share of
| how large private companies, startups, government
| organizations and colleges work.
|
| A lot of my projects pre AI involved bringing modern
| DevOps practices to an organization - convincing
| operations to use IAC and best practices and have them
| more embedded into the dev teams.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Help me understand this 'embedded in developer teams' in
| a larger company. Do you have no central infrastructure
| with centralized tooling, alerting, standards and
| knowledge?
|
| Team A has a devops engineer, Teams B through F have one,
| how do they have any capacity to pursue long term
| strategical projects, save money and operational effort
| with centralized hosting and tooling, and basically have
| some autonomy, when they are enslaved to a Scrum Master
| and some hokey pokey Fibonacci numbers and T Shirt Size
| nonsense having to argue priorities in every Sprint
| against people who don't care about operations?
|
| That's what embedded devops is to me - an operational
| role enslaved to dev leads, the poor guy who has to
| troubleshoot a failed release while the devs are at the
| bar.
|
| Unless my straw man is wildly off, no thanks to that
| embedded stuff.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's exactly what it means , a person who reports to
| the infrastructure team who decides standards and is
| embedded with the devs as part of the project.
|
| If you are just throwing things over the fence - you're
| an "operations" team and get none of the benefits of
| DevOps
| mancerayder wrote:
| Understood, but so far what I observed is the embedded
| devops pressured/saying Yes/beholden to a PM running
| sprints, and the central infra team management constantly
| has to intervene to protect the embedded devops engineer
| politically.
|
| Maybe my experience is a rare example, but my conclusion
| so far is that it's tricky to prevent this painful
| situation, and requires vigilance.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And once you have the infra team saying no all of the
| time and being antagonistic - you're back to old school
| operations and you aren't a DevOps shop.
| mancerayder wrote:
| But if they never say no, how do you maintain central
| infrastructure standards?
|
| If you say yes all the time, I feel like that's how you
| turn devops into Ops monkeys who are reactive, since
| people are operating on Sprint timelines instead of
| optimizing for long-term stability.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Why do you think that?
|
| The OP wrote:
|
| > _As an SE, I 'm exposed to everything. Customers running
| Kubernetes, ECS, Lambda, bare metal, air-gapped environments.
| AWS, Azure, GCP, hybrid setups. CI/CD in Jenkins, GitHub
| Actions, GitLab, CircleCI. I have to understand their
| environment well enough to actually help them, so the
| learning is constant. The stagnation I felt in DevOps? Gone._
|
| These are all things I deal with in my day to day as well in
| a DevOps / Infrastructure / Platform type of role. I mean,
| not literally everything like air-gapped environments since
| the companies I work for don't have that but it's all things
| in that category of line of work.
|
| The only difference is I usually don't interface directly
| with the company's customers of the services being built.
| It's more like the company's staff are my customers because
| I'm working with developers, management and sometimes other
| parts of the business on ways to help optimize their
| workflows which all funnel back to helping create a better
| end customer experience.
| NoSalt wrote:
| 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!
| jpollock wrote:
| 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.
| bobanrocky wrote:
| 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
| jpollock wrote:
| 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");
| }
|
| Where the one who does do devops writes code that avoids
| the error condition entirely (usually possible), or decides
| what the code should do in that situation (not log).
| esseph wrote:
| > 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.
| rirze wrote:
| It truly depends on the type of DevOps experience. I've
| avoided firefighting DevOps roles my career and I enjoy it.
| Having the space to step back and design intelligent
| dependent systems is satisfying.
| antonvs wrote:
| This sounds very adversarial to me. I'm glad our devops team
| doesn't think like you.
| jpollock wrote:
| In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It
| was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is
| the hardware working, is the network working?) was
| separate, and had different metrics.
|
| Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both
| orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with
| independent goals.
|
| Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who
| resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart
| is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team
| make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from
| another, or is it company-wide?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If you have a "DevOps team" - they are operations and you
| aren't getting any of the benefits of a DevOps mindset
| antonvs wrote:
| Meh, real life is a bit more complicated than a
| manifesto.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked
| for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud +
| app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did
| the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard.
|
| What's the difference between a "DevOps team" in 2026
| than "operations" in 2001?
| antonvs wrote:
| The difference is what they do. Assisting other teams
| with creating fully automated build and test pipelines.
| Managing infrastructure using automated systems.
| Identifying issues in production systems that other teams
| should look at, down to a level of granularity that
| wasn't really possible in 2001.
|
| > affective
|
| You mean "effective".
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It very much was possible in 2001. In 2001 we automated
| updating and automating our 15 or so Windows job runners
| with Perl and the Win32:: module.
|
| No large enterprise by 2001 was walking up to individual
| PCs and updating computers by walking around and sticking
| CDs/DVDs in each computer and they were definitely making
| sure our on prem SQL Server and later MySQL database
| wasn't having issues using dashboards and alerts.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| DevOps is secretly spiral development.
|
| Great if billing by the hour, and mostly unsustainable for
| products =3
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Same thing happened to me at a company several years ago. It
| felt like they wanted me in two roles but were only paying me
| for one. Didn't take long for me to jump ship after that.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I am first and foremost still a software developer as far as my
| hands on keyboard job. I absolutely love being able to set up
| my own infrastructure without depending on glorified system
| administrators who call themselves "DevOps Engineers". It's all
| just code at the end of the day - setting up infrastructure
| involves writing yaml, HCL or actual code (CDk).
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > I like writing code ... ONLY!
|
| Boy do I have some bad news for you...
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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.
| meken wrote:
| Can relate a lot. I started off as a SWE but am pursuing a
| support role for similar reasons.
| meken wrote:
| > 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.
| zingar wrote:
| > answer the same support questions. Repeat.
|
| This is not devops, this is someone managing yaml to allow an org
| to avoid doing devops.
|
| Devops is practiced by everyone. If there are people asking the
| same questions over and over there is a feedback loop / education
| / automation problem and THAT is the part that makes a job
| devops.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| > _Part of it was repetition. My days had become predictable:
| check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke
| overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp
| Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same
| support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging
| had become routine._
|
| This isn't "DevOps". This is "IT Support".
|
| But honestly, if you aren't embedded into a team where developers
| and infrastructure folks are working together - you aren't doing
| anything differently than old school operations people did 25
| years ago
| k__ wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| In most companies, IT people just started coding and called it
| DevOps.
|
| Still better than IT folks who refuse to code.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Smart IT people were automating things with Perl and later
| Powershell since I started professionally working in Windows
| shops in 2000.
|
| Before that I was working on DEC VAX machines where IT was
| using DCL.
| k__ wrote:
| Yeah, but I studied with a bunch of guys who said they'd go
| into IT, because they hated coding.
| mancerayder wrote:
| You can hate coding and be an excellent network engineer
| or even DBA.
|
| I'm an infrastructure guy and I learned to code, but I
| don't code today. The other poster who talked about good
| people in the old days using Perl and suchlike tools is
| right. Competent people care about automation.
|
| But there are all sorts of automation tools that don't
| require knowing how to write object oriented code or do a
| ton of code reviews. Terraform is one - it's yaml, and
| the complexity is one of design patterns. Another is
| Ansible. GitHub Actions. Many many more.
|
| Let me throw out a grenade. Software developers often
| over estimate their capabilities in technology. Because a
| person is an expert in Ruby or Go, and on the weekend
| they stood up a hosted app on ECS, now magically they're
| geniuses and understand DevOps.
|
| False. DevOps engineering, network engineering, DBA, and
| a lot of other non-developer jobs take 5-10 years to get
| right.
|
| Hopefully I've slammed our Leetcode hiring practices, but
| really I'm just venting at this point.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's a red flag anytime I see a company with a dedicated
| "database administrator" usually they want you to put all
| of your business logic in stored procedures and have a
| dozen GetCustomer_n copies for versioning.
|
| What can a modern operations person do that can automated
| anything via coding?
|
| BTW: I am "expert" in cloud by any definition (did at a
| startup, worked at AWS ProServe, staff consultant at a
| 3rd party consulting company) and I develop. How hard do
| you really think it is for someone with a developer
| mindset to learn how system design works at scale and
| bring their same developer mindset to infrastructure as
| code?
|
| It took me exactly 2.5 years from opening the AWS console
| for the first time to being hired at AWS.
|
| Everyone in my division at my current company at my level
| can hold their own as either a developer or a "senior
| cloud engineer". We just find infrastructure babysitting
| incredibly boring
|
| Half the reason I learned cloud was not because I didn't
| want to manage servers - I didn't want to deal with
| server administrations.
| mancerayder wrote:
| >BTW: I am "expert" in cloud by any definition (did at a
| startup, worked at AWS ProServe, staff consultant at a
| 3rd party consulting company) and I develop. How hard do
| you really think it is for someone with a developer
| mindset to learn how system design works at scale and
| bring their same developer mindset to infrastructure as
| code?
|
| It depends! Do you mean clicking in the AWS console and
| spinning up infrastructure? It takes a few days.
|
| Learning terraform/CloudFormation so it's repeatable?
| Probably a few weeks.
|
| Kubernetes design patterns and troubleshooting? I feel
| like it takes at least a few months of hands on and
| theoretical.
|
| To build infrastructure that lasts, is monitored with an
| APM as well as infrastructure specific tooling (not
| Cloudwatch) has cost dashboards set up to account for
| workloads across a dozen product lines (not Cost
| Explorer), has a CI CD pipeline automation for hundreds
| of repos including automatic onboarding of new ones,
| understands cloud security enough to have designed a
| tight perimeter with some automation around detection and
| remediation, has strong network level knowledge and knows
| how to deal with external vendor/client connectivity
| options (since you have to adapt to their limitations or
| demands)... Instead of server babysitting, you know in
| advance how to prepare the inevitable situation where
| workloads need to scale, and already have tooling and
| horizontal and vertical auto scaling either automated or
| ready to go...
|
| If you know these things after 2.5 years, and I say this
| fully seriously, you are in some sort of .5 percent elite
| in this industry and deserve something like 1M a year, or
| you should be leading something huge.
|
| Otherwise there's a risk here that you don't know what
| you don't know, which was my original point about over
| confidence by software engineers when it comes to
| infrastructure.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You did see the part that I worked at startup for 2.5
| years, then worked at AWS ProServe for almost 4 and now
| work at a third party consulting company as a staff
| consultant leading cloud + app dev hybrid projects?
|
| I turned down a job where the position was going to be
| created for me by a former coworker at AWS who is now a
| director at a well known non tech F500 company where I
| would be responsible for a multi year migration and
| modernization strategy that would have paid about 30%
| more than I was making at AWS.
|
| I really _hate_ babysitting infrastructure and lift and
| shifts so much I turned it down and took a job that paid
| the same as I was making at AWS. That's just how much
| more I enjoy the hybrid cloud + app dev roles.
|
| I deal strictly with AWS on the infrastructure side, the
| minute I'm working on a large assessment (those huge 50
| page requirement docs) and they mention hybrid, or
| anything outside of AWS, I bring in someone who actually
| likes that stuff. As I do when I see it's going to be a
| migration.
|
| The other side of my job is to actually do hands on app
| dev + cloud either doing it myself for small projects or
| leading larger ones.
|
| I'm also not the person who is going to be on call or
| monitoring, that's for the young folks.
|
| My last three projects were using the CDK, Terraform and
| CloudFormation respectively
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| What in god's name is the meaning of the image on their homepage?
| It looks like a conceptual, digital rendering of a colonoscopy.
|
| https://infisical.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.c...
| dddw wrote:
| :D Yes, we demand an explanation!
| solatic wrote:
| > I started dreading the monotony of it all... My days had become
| predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug
| whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain
| the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines,
| answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to
| feel engaging had become routine.
|
| Why are you checking dashboards (pull/polling) instead of
| building alerting (push), so that you do not need to check
| dashboards as a matter of routine? If the tickets are dealing
| with the same problem again and again, why aren't you building a
| self-service platform to let your users handle these problems by
| themselves (especially now that LLMs are making this much more
| trivial to build)?
|
| Author sounds like he had poor technical management who didn't
| understand DevOps (let alone DevSecOps) and turned it into an
| operations role.
|
| Everything that the author likes about Solutions Engineering, I
| get from a DevOps role, from collaborating with other engineers
| in my company to make them more agile, productive, and take
| better ownership in production. Too many engineering teams fall
| into a trap of not being allowed to focus on any non-functional
| work (gotta ship revenue-generating features!) and LOVE it when
| someone like me comes along, who doesn't answer to Product, and
| can help them out on the non-functional side. I get to talk to
| "customers" as much as I want, in a role where I can just walk up
| to them and not need to communicate over Zoom or with significant
| plane travel.
|
| Author should have considered trying to just find a different
| Platform Engineering role.
| Roark66 wrote:
| My path was opposite...
|
| Started in early 200x sysadmining Linux boxes. Moved to an MS
| gold partner that started with 6 employees and ended up with 45
| by the time I left. So you can imagine the kind of work and
| solutions we did, started with mom and pop, ended up doing email
| systems for a 20k user system, also picked up vmware/sphere, perl
| scripting a big monitoring system for over a year and hacking old
| binary only legacy software to extract data, lots of extremely
| varied short term projects.
|
| Then got onto the "Solutions Architect" career path. Did that for
| 6 years ending up in a big telco. I ended up being bored out of
| my mind just doing designs/tech sales/delegating all the "real
| work".
|
| I decided to go into Devops and switch to contracting at the same
| time. I now realise that was over 10 years ago now.
|
| I couldn't be happier with my job since then. It's 100% remote,
| It's hands on troubleshooting when things go horribly wrong, it's
| solving hard problems with automation and in last 2 years lots of
| AI when the clients decide to rip out a huge amount of
| integration and switch clouds/other software and so on every 2
| years :-)
|
| It pays a little less and definitely has less prestige than
| "Solutions" for a huge telco (and I no longer wear a suit at
| work), but I can definitely see myself being happy doing that for
| next 10 years (if the role still exists then).
| mancerayder wrote:
| How can I pay you to tell me your secret path to consulting in
| DevOps?
|
| I'd love to do this or SRE type consulting. However, every
| organization I've worked with (including finance and
| government) use big name big business consulting shops,
| supposedly for liability reasons, and it would be impossible to
| get a small consulting contract unless you had family members
| in the C suite.
|
| Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with
| highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers
| for 40 percent of the rate?
| nunez wrote:
| I made the jump into SE (sales/solution engineering) three years
| ago after a long career as a SRE/systems/software engineer (the
| kind that found any excuse to break out ilspy, windbg, gdb and/or
| tcpdump on the job) and have a love-hate relationship with it.
|
| This is a long post, but SEs are underrepresented here despite us
| being a big part of the sky high valuations that many companies
| on here have gotten, and it's a job that is still somehow not
| well known or understood.
|
| I LOVE the travel. As someone whose happy place is seat 20F on a
| United 738 and a rental EV waiting on the other side, the random
| travel requests give me so much life. I enjoyed the 4 on, 3 off
| travel life as a consultant as well, but being asked to fly in
| for a meeting or two and get time to myself the day before is so
| much better. In fact, this is probably THE reason why I haven't
| gone back into the FTE world. Travel budgets for engineers are
| generally pithy.
|
| I LOVE not having to answer to a Jira backlog. I can (and do)
| still ship PRs back to product if it makes sense for the
| customers I'm supporting, but my performance comp isn't tied to
| that. Interestingly enough, we are also not forced to use AI when
| coding for the same reason (though using it to understand what
| our customers are being increasingly asked to use is important,
| so I do sometimes).
|
| Speaking of comp, I LOVE how transparent our comp packages are.
| The base salary is usually competitive with a high Senior/low
| Staff SWE, but unlike these roles, we don't get very many RSUs.
| What we do get is commission. The more we sell, the more we make.
| No black box bonus pool allocation nonsense. Some SEs can take in
| Staff+ total comp some years if they and their AE close a whale
| of a deal because of this. What's better about comp as an SE is
| that it's usually not regional. This makes the position super
| lucrative for engineers in LCOL/MCOL cities who don't mind
| getting on a plane every so often.
|
| We also get a lot of time and space to tinker with the products
| we're selling when we're not out in the field (since we usually
| have to know them front to back; it's not uncommon for SEs to
| know more about a product than engineering or even Product). Most
| good SE managers will absolutely support you blocking off time to
| build, which is awesome!
|
| Interviews are also WAY more than chill than those for SWE. No LC
| grinds. The hardest part is usually the tech panel (which is easy
| if you're good at presenting and explaining technical things in
| an accessible way).
|
| So now onto the not so fun parts.
|
| You are usually tied to a non-technical account executive
| (salesperson). The nature of that role attracts lots
| of...interesting people. Your entire existence as an SE hinges on
| how well you get along with your AE. A great relationship makes
| SE the best job in the world. Anything else makes it somewhere
| between a slog and hell on earth.
|
| This is also a sales job at the end of the day. There's lots of
| talking and socializing involved. Not nearly as much as an AE,
| but doing happy hours and dinners sometimes comes with the job.
| As a massive introvert who often wants nothing more than to read
| Hacker News over a nice beer in sweet solitude at the end of an
| intense workday, you can probably imagine how draining these
| events can be.
|
| Then there are the demos and POCs: the bread and butter of the
| role. Depending on where you are, you might be giving the same
| demo handfuls of times per day. These can be made more fun by
| working in investigative questions about the customer you're
| presenting to to learn more about them and why they need what
| you're selling (also called "discovery"), but some AEs won't give
| you that space. Feeling like your job is replaceable isn't great
| (even though it's not replaceable at all!)
|
| There also isn't much upward mobility in this vertical. You can
| go a lot of places OUTSIDE the SE track given the cross-cutting
| nature of the job (Product, CTO, AE, and even back into
| engineering are common paths), but scope as an SE is narrower
| than the SWE path, as, again, its a sales job. (That said,
| getting into the Principal SE track usually involves talking at
| big shows and brand building like writing books, skills that are
| very useful if you want a heavy hitting job elsewhere or want to
| be the kind of person that gets paid to keynote conferences).
|
| Many of the thought leaders in the SE space are technical but
| have lost their edge. Many of them are closer to sales than
| engineering. Some literally sell their presales methodologies and
| don't do technical stuff anymore. Great if you want to move away
| from that career; less so if you don't. More engineering-biased
| people might feel out of place initially.
|
| Skill atrophy is also very real, counter to OPs observations. You
| can get away with minimal learning once you know what you're
| doing and have your demos locked in. It takes a while to get to
| this point, but once you're there, you can give a demo point
| blank a any time and are familiar enough with your product to
| lead a POC start to finish without blinking. This combined with
| not having time to "deep" learn due to meetings, demos and POCs
| can lead to skills slipping away.
|
| Finally, that time to tinker can be hard to get if you're in a
| patch of heavy sales activity. This is felt the hardest when you
| join a new org and are sent into the field straightaway. This is
| often why so many SEs are usually former consultants of that
| product or ex-customers: shorter ramp-up time.
|
| This can make it difficult to get back into a pure engineering
| role if SE doesn't work out. You won't have enough day to day
| experience to make hiring managers feel comfortable in bringing
| you on, which is a massive disadvantage in this market.
|
| All in all, it's an awesome and somewhat safe career path that is
| a front row seat to how the money comes in, but it's heavily
| situational and probably not a fit for more introverted folks.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Thank you. Can't upvote you enough for the info.
| chopete3 wrote:
| Solution Engineering is a highly sought after role in startups
| and growth companies. It is an important role in established
| enterprises too but it won't be seen as an IP role. It is a great
| escape career path for engineers from pay scale change
| perspective. The author didn't touch upon that part but there was
| certainly a big salary increase.
| k__ wrote:
| Some people mentioned to me that going Solutions Engineer was a
| good way to get more non-technical/business skills.
|
| I saw a few SEs starting their own companies later, seemingly
| because their SE roles "trained" them for the business side of
| things.
|
| I considered doing this myself; however, I'm a freelance software
| engineer and technical writer. More a jack of all trades than
| someone with major skills in one category of software
| engineering.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A jack of all trades is preferable as a solutions engineer.
| bstsb wrote:
| side note, i absolutely love Infisical's self-hosted offering.
| it's really easy to get set up with and aside from a few minor
| problems with their Universal Auth, i had it working in
| production in just a few days. it's made secret management a lot
| easier, especially across different environments!
|
| i'm aware that there are limits on the free plan, but as a single
| user i haven't hit any crazy restrictions
| vmatsiiako wrote:
| Really glad to hear that! What problems did you have with
| Universal Auth?
| bstsb wrote:
| upon remembering, it was actually just Token Auth - for some
| reason, when i created a machine identity in my parent
| organization, tbe CLI would always return a 403 for any
| project ID, regardless of whether i gave the identity the
| adequate permissions.
|
| i got around it by just generating an identity for each
| project, which was probably a better idea anyway for
| granularity
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant,
| make more money, not go into management and not still be trying
| to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a
| b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to
| "the business".
|
| I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev -
| "application modernization" at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took
| advantage of every opportunity to put myself in front of the
| customer virtually and physically.
|
| Learned through osmosis how the senior consultants, engagement
| managers (project managers) and account managers operated.
|
| Got Amazoned almost 4 years later and became a staff consultant
| at a 3rd party firm (equivalent to a senior at AWS or GCP) and
| while I lead "delivery" projects, I'm still learning how things
| work at the next higher level of the funnel - pre sales. The
| level of ambiguity is high by the time it gets to me. But at
| least sales has narrowed down what high level business outcomes
| the customer wants.
|
| My thesis is the closer I get to both the revenue drivers and
| where people skills matter, the less ageism is a factor and
| experience is actually rewarded and the harder it is to be
| outsourced, commoditized or replaced with AI. I've been concerned
| about commoditization for over a decade and that definitely
| happened on the enterprise dev side
| mptest wrote:
| is there anyway you'd be willing to field a few questions from
| a soon to be cs grad interested deeply in this specific career
| path after realizing they'd been doing it in a way for free
| already. good experience, but unconventional experience who
| aspires to a position similar to yours?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Everyone I know who has done it, started out as a developer,
| moved up to a tech lead position and while doing so learned
| soft skills and presentations and gut real world experience
| with designing systems and then moved into consulting.
|
| It's from my seeing the lay of the land in 2026 almost
| impossible to get a full time job in a consulting company
| starting out of a college with just an undergrad doing
| something technical - unless you are in one of the cheaper
| countries to hire from.
|
| Most besides the WITCH companies use the business models of
| hire people in the US for the customer facing roles and hire
| people in cheaper countries for the Lower level roles.
| mancerayder wrote:
| How would one go from devops or sre management to a customer
| facing pre sales role like you described?
|
| I thought sales was a separate career path.
|
| I relate 100 percent to your realization about competing with
| 25 year olds on Leetcode. I'm comfortable, but I realize
| finding a new job is harder than ever, even though I am as
| valuable as ever - they want me not only to have proven I can
| 10x a company managing infra and people (I did and have), but
| they expect me to spend my weekends coding, and not just coding
| but coding esoteric algorithms than no one uses outside of
| academia.
|
| And meanwhile there's an enormous amount of messages here on HN
| about how managers are useless and mean.
|
| It's a weird spot to be in, so I'm opting for trying to prepay
| mortgages as quickly as humanly possible before I'm unemployed
| forever and have to call it retirement (and which might have to
| take place in a cheaper foreign country).
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I too am working on my out of the country back up plan. My
| wife and I are going to one of those countries for 5 weeks in
| a couple of weeks. We have already looked into residency
| requirements as a Plan B.
|
| I am just starting to get a peek under the cover for sales.
| If I understand it correctly.
|
| - "Someone" is hustling to make first contact with the
| customer or if you are a partner of one of the cloud
| providers, they send customers your way. I have no clue how
| this part works.
|
| - The SA talks to the potential client enough to get high
| level business requirements to shape the contract. I'm not an
| SA. But there is a certain AWS speciality where I'm usually
| pulled in at this phase. We are trying to build expertise
| around this specialty. My former mentee is an SA at AWS so I
| know how they operate.
|
| - After the contract is designed, I work with sales to
| understand the opportunity and I am the first person that
| does a deep requirement analysis - the business case is
| known, the technical requirements are ambiguous. I am
| responsible for getting the requirements and doing the
| design, talking to the technical guys, finance, security and
| the business folks to make sure their needs are met.
|
| - then I lead the project, before AI, I would have needed a
| couple of people on the project. Now I can do it myself most
| of the time. It was never lack of knowledge, there are only
| so much I can do myself.
|
| To your second question, the last 2016-2024 when I set on
| this path is a lot different than it is now.
|
| I guess the best way is to work backwards from where you want
| to be to where you are.
|
| 1. How often do you know the business requirements in advance
| compared to how often are they given to you?
|
| 2. The money and the opportunities are in leading migrations.
| There are very few decent paying hands on keyboard "doers"
| those are easy to outsource. I lucked up that I got my job in
| a division that does care about "developers who know cloud
| and can lead implementations"
|
| 3. How are your project management skills? The ugly truth is
| PMs are useless when it comes to tech projects, you are the
| one that has to have the proper context to know dependencies,
| how to break things down, critical paths, etc.
|
| 4. Have you led implementations larger than what you can do
| yourself? Hands on keyboard folks are a dime a dozen and
| companies can pay them a fifth of what they pay you.
|
| 5. How are your presentation and communication skills? Can
| you explain what you did to someone non technical but knows
| their business, sonrie who understands technology but not
| what you did and someone who knows the technology and wants
| to know why you made the decisions you made?
|
| 6. Do you have experience juggling conflicting stakeholder
| agreements
|
| 7. How is both your small talk and business speak - "adding
| on to what Becky said", "finding alignment", "a single pane
| of glass", "taking things to the parking lot", "we aren't
| solutioning yet, let's talk about your business opportunities
| and challenges "?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I worked for 7 years employed by a high throughput computing
| facility at a large university as a combination of solution
| engineer/software architect. I got paid to network with faculty,
| listen to their problems, pitch them ideas and implement POCs,
| then help them iterate and scale.
|
| If the management of the department hadn't been so
| catastrophically bad, it would have been the ideal job. Working
| more traditional software engineering roles afterwards was
| frustrating, I missed the freedom. Even as a tech lead, it just
| felt like managing plumbers. I love creativity and exploration,
| nuts and bolts are incidental.
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