Ask HN: Engineering roles in sales orgs?

Posted by atkq on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @12:00PM
from the ask-hn dept.

For the past few years the company I work for has been trying to recruit engineers to join their sales org. We started by recruiting for a very general engineering position and have recently tried to be more specific in the roles we're looking for, i.e Solution Architect.

I've observed that engineers do not stay in these roles for very long. Some complain that their technical skills are not kept sharp, others that the work that they do day to day is not satisfying. Some feel like their not seen as 'real engineers' by the engineering department -- for many of them it's easier to get an engineering role at another company rather than transfer internally. There is a general view that very little career development is possible.

We’ve cycled through a couple of different managers (all non technical) and have tried to define what career advancement looks like but haven’t hit on something that aligns the engineers belief that they can add the most value by building tools with the metrics of the sales org.

Are there any of companies that have successfully staffed engineering positions in sales (or more generally, non-engineering) orgs?

If your company does this, how is it structured and what processes do you have in place to keep engineers happy?

Re:Ask HN: Engineering roles in sales orgs? by sebmak on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @12:09PM (#19154581)

At my org we call them "Opportunity Engineers". We do this to position them mentally that their job is to create new opportunities with every client. This means that they have to use whatever technology they want to solve the clients requests as simple as possible. They are still umbrella'd under the Engineering department and attend the same standups and meetings as all the other engineers. They work closely with our engineering leads to make sure their solutions won't cause a disconnect in our grander technology stack. Often times the solutions they prototype for a client end up becoming a longer term solution that we try and market to others. So when that happens they are brought back into the Engineering team and lead the effort in building that solution into a full product.

We also make sure it is as seamless as possible if someone wants to transfer internally. Our Engineering department is relatively flat, in that Team Leads are more of Project Leads and will shift from engineer to lead from project to project. And engineers are encouraged to join whatever projects they find fascinating

[ Parent | on HN ]