It’s not my writing. I just am aggregating articles that I find around the web. I’m not a professional investor or anything like that. Very transparent about that.
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply. Generally I like writing and am good at it when I'm in the right mindset. I feel like there's politics to everything but I hear that PMing it is extra prevalent so that is something I need to consider. Most of the PMs I work with now are in meeting hell, so I wonder if they need better processes. Anyways, thanks again for the thoughtful answer. It sounds overall like a net positive career change for you.
Yea I really appreciate that candor. I am quite worried that I would end up the same way. I think that is what is worrying me and has me asking this question.
Have you tried any courses or read books on how to discover initiatives from the company's strategy and goals? It sounds like maybe the company doesn't have those clearly defined if it is hard to figure out what to do next, granted I know nothing about your company and product team makeup. Best of luck!
Idk about significantly less. Based on some research I've done, they make less, but nothing that I can't live comfortably with. Also just because something is in demand doesn't mean that I enjoy doing it still.
You are competing with both engineers and the MBA pool for the same job. The number of PMs roles available are a fraction of the number of engineering opportunities. The good APM roles at top companies are saturated with applicants and the average ones pay a fraction of what software engineering pays.
I looked back through your comments and noted you posted a similar Ask HN a couple months back... look if you are a CTO and have a reasonable network (or can quickly build a network) there are plenty of companies that would take you in a sales / pre-sales engineering type capacity on the basis that you:
a) presumably understand tech / can learn quickly
b) will have street cred from your past experiences
c) will presumably bring some kind of network / rolodex with you
So, don't stress - if you can put a confident foot forward, you probably have more going than you realize. It's just a matter of how you sell it to a future employer.
The first job I was offered was a sales engineer role. The interviewer said sales was easy. Understanding the product (oscilloscopes) was not and required at least a degree. The target market didn't care if you were charismatic, they just wanted the right to for the job.
There's plenty of highly technical things from databases to Jira that appreciate dev experience more than sales experience.
Look for companies on the smaller to mid size businesses that do IT services consulting. Companies and the expectations of sales on the product side are much different from what I have seen (or enjoy).
That sounds incredible, honestly I am quite jealous as it sounds like a grind to get to where you are. I will have to look into this more. I have always enjoyed real estate related stuff so maybe this could be a good calling.
Appreciate the sentiment, and I’m glad to have been afforded the opportunity to have a faster track into this than most. Another reason why there is such a lack of working appraisers now is the same reason why it was easier for me to find a supervisor to train me: You either have family in the industry, or a close friend that gets you a foot in the door.
I will be a 3rd generation appraiser, following in the footsteps of my father (who has been in the industry at different levels for 30+ years), and his father (who got into the profession my answering a newspaper ad for FHA appraisers). For the longest time I balked at going into “the family business”, and it took me beating my head against a wall at places that didn’t give a shit about me or my skills to find the one place both of those things were taken seriously.
A side note for those reading this that have ADHD, I cannot stress how much of an overlap there is with appraisers and having some sort of attention disorder. This is not a bad thing, but a pattern I’ve noticed in talking to appraisers from around the US, but many of us seem to have self selected into a profession that works really well with the way that some forms of ADHD work. The specific report forms we fill provide structure and readability of the written reports we prepare, but the randomness and dopamine hit of a new subject and comparable sales to analyze every report keep it fresh.
Any questions anyone has, more than happy to answer!
What kind of role did you have when you switched to real estate? I have actually been thinking about becoming an agent since you can make decent money and the licensing process seems rather simple for what it is.
I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.
I've made personal contact with various people on HN over the years. I'd be glad to bounce ideas around about your current career or other options, just share your contact info in some way and we'll set up a call.
I was freelancing when I made the move to real estate, so in that regard I was already comfortable in a self-employed role. Many people in tech (myself included) are excessively introverted. If this describes you, you'll want to consider how you feel about a career move where lots of contact with the general public is necessary, and how you'll cope with that for yourself.
Yes, the licensing is straightforward - I'm licensed in two states and am considering getting my license in a third. That said, it's a lot like how we talk about the 10x engineer in software - there's a huge gap between having a license and actually being a skilled professional. The average US agent makes something like $60K a year, whereas the top earners (and of course market matters...) make many multiples of that. Real estate is not a monolith - there are many different directions you can take a career. If you aren't comfortable with being an entrepreneur / self-employed person, you'll have a harder time of it.
Again, happy to talk more about licensing, how to choose a brokerage, finding your niche, etc. Likewise, if you go down that path I'm happy to introduce you to mentors, contacts, etc where possible.
> I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.
I am currently in technical sales (Presales is the name of my org).
This absolutely is not the case. There aren't a ton of folks crossing over but one of my team members did so and has been quite successful.
While it wasn't from a software engineering role, I moved to technical sales from the org's support group so I have the faintest sense of what pitfalls that you may go through.
At the end of the day, many folks in Support groups and R&D groups can fall into the trap of thinking narrowly about a problem. Let us take the problem of getting data into an application. In this scenario a customer asks you if your tool supports 'real time data'. The direct answer is no, it takes time for the tool to fetch / process / present the data from the source system. From a technical lens, this is absolutely, 100% correct. From a selling lens, it's helpful to redirect the conversation towards the customer's goal. Their goal is that they have the lowest latency data possible. This isn't a binary yes / no situation like the previous question.
Now it's relevant to ask questions like:
- What is the source system?
- Is the source truly the originator of the data or is it a downstream consumer of a pipeline?
- If it's not the originator, then how frequently is this pipeline run? Real-time? Micro-batch? What is the latency here?
- Is the source a fixed price system or a cloud-native platform (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, etc) where there are marginal costs per query?
- How many consumers will there be of this data? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Data approaches often can be cost / performance effective at one scale but flounder at another.
The net result is that the key question that you have to ask involves focusing on the _problem_ the potential customer wants to solve, not just the mechanics of how to solve it.
That plus
- the politics of the deal
- answering the question at the right level of grain for an audience (engineers get different frames of the same answer than VPs / Executives)
- positioning your differentiated techniques and technologies early in the deal to nudge out competitors (they will be doing the same)
- explaining broad or complicated techniques in a consumable fashion (aka a ton of PowerPoint slides) and a number of other aspects
Feel free to ping me (email is in my profile) if you want to chat more about this.
This is by far the longest I have ever been with a company. I am rolling on 7 years at the moment. Part of me thinks that time off and a new company could be the answer but it's hard to know.
Well you knnow, after all this time you can find a place to "coast" with your skills.
Example, I've always been a bit put off by the plethora of syntaxes and frameworks in javascript, and I lawnmowered my toes off with angular one fine july, but recently discovered svelte-kit.
It's a cinch, a few practice projects, a few paid ones, and one upwork refund later, I'm getting quite confident in my abilities to turn out decent stuff fast.
And the "fast" is the most important thing, with my new found impatience for not being thirty anymore.
