I arrived at the same realization as you--having sales as a skill is beneficial no matter the career path a person is on.
As developer of ~10 years experience, the path I took to get sales experience was to take a job as a sales engineer for a technical product in my software domain. It is the best career decision I have made so far.
My fear was that I would lose my technical knowledge, but I quickly realized that was not the risk I thought it was. I am consistently challenged by the breadth and depth of questions posed by each customer based on their unique needs. As a sales engineer, I learn more in my technical domain than I did at my last humdrum dev job.
And on top of that, of course, I get exposure and practice in this other side of the business and set of skills that was previously an enigma to me.
For me, sales engineering is the best of both worlds.
I completely agree, and I am surprised your comment was the only that mentioned sales engineering. Like you, I took a sales engineering role for a technical product, and it was by far the best way for me to learn sales (coming from a software background).
Plus, while there is an abundance of sales materials out there, none of them will prepare you as well as actually doing the thing. I'm not scared of talking to customers, no matter what impressive titles they may bring to the table -- I've already spoken with dozens of other CTOs, CISOs, COOs, etc. from the deals I worked on. I'm acutely aware of the art of a pitch, and have a mental model for which techniques are crucial and which are to be avoided. After practicing the pitch/demo enough, I was able to start analyzing my choice of words, flow, etc. during the actual call (as opposed to after the fact). I also learned the art to managing deal cycles, and an immediate "no" is vastly preferable to a "no" after being strung along for a year. Perhaps most importantly, I learned how to be the trusted technical advisor to the customer -- the sales rep may want every deal to close, whether or not it's a good fit, but that's not the way to happy customers and good integrity in the sales process.
I only did the sales engineering role for a little under a year, but it provided me with incredible value.
Minneapolis allows beekeeping in the city as long as your adjacent neighbors sign off on it and you notify the city (there might be fees, but I don’t recall). There isn’t any exemption that I know of but I’m on board with the city allowing residents to keep them. Good on you, Texas (and any place else with friendly bee keeping laws)
Why shouldn't big landowners get the benefit if they are truly bee friendly? It would take way more small landowners to have the same effect. Why not give a break to people under 5 acres as well?
Thanks for posting this. I have a climate change related project that is getting traction and its needs are exceeding my ability to keep up with the dev work. Hopefully these communities have someone who would like to help. If anyone on HN is interested in helping, you can find details in my profile.
Coal's carbon dioxide pollution can be limited through carbon capture technology. The U.S. government recently incentivized power producers to implement this technology with the expanded 45Q tax credit. We'll see if it pencils out well enough for broad adoption.
These approaches get amplified by a price on carbon. If you are interested in convincing your Member of Congress to price carbon, take a look at the most effective organization doing this work: http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org
Thank you for introducing me to Project Drawdown. How eminently practical and sensible these recommendations are. I love the data-driven approach.
I was surprised to find that, of all things, "Refrigerant Management" is the single thing that holds the greatest potential to reduce carbon emissions [1]. It makes a lot of sense, but it would definitely not be what I would have guessed.
Thank you for spreading the word about Drawdown and CCL!
They are probably the two easiest ways regular folks can learn about and get involved in climate policy (and I mean real impacts, not just clicktivism).
Please get involved – it takes no money and very little time!
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Hiring across a variety of engineering teams and technologies.
You can join an advocacy group such as Citizens' Climate Lobby and build political will for a livable world. CCL has been incredibly successful by, for example, creating the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which counts among its membership 30 Republican members of Congress. CCL is effective and is volunteer driven, so the chapter in your area needs you.
