Plan a career in IT: goal - £100k PA.
- Thread starter Diddums
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Soldato
- Joined
- 16 Aug 2009
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I don't have to add other than echo pursue something that interests you rather than the money I used to know someone who built up a business from nothing and eventually sold it for millions by his 40's he had this huge house collection of cars including porsches ferraris gorgeous girlfriend you name it. Well after effectively retiring you'd think he'd be set for life right? Well no he sold up and took to buying up old houses to do them up himself and sell them on not for the money he had plenty of that but for the sake of something to do with nothing left to achieve in life he was bored out of his brains.100k in IT is relatively easy as long as you arent going for entry or even mid level jobs. Hell, day rate experienced developers in mid london can command £500-800 a day quite easily. Fall onto the right PM role and you can 2x-3x that without many companies even batting an eyelid.
Get into specialist areas, highly desired certs or PM/PD/LD roles, and you are laughing to the bank.
On the flip side is some of these specialist areas or roles are absolutely soul crushingly boring, I would burn out 3-4 times a year quite easily. This is why my mental outlet has been buying nice cars to be able to step away and just go for an enjoyable drive.
Part of what ive done in the last 2-3 years is really roll back the boring yet high paid work I was involved in and take up projects I want to do, for example working for ocuk on the forums. The development work done on here and working with the mods, dons and ocuk has been much more rewarding on a personal level and I enjoy the work 100x more than the specialist db admin stuff.
Realistically, with my rental properties and assets, I could theoretically retire at this point in life (34 for those wondering). But am still actively looking for new business opportunities, contracts and just stuff thats of interest to me rather than the money it commands.
So my main advice from all of it is pursue something of interest over the money.
You can't walk into any top tech company as an SE without any prior experience relevant to the role. Fred the bin man (or other job you care to mention) can't walk into (let's say) Microsoft and become an SE on £120K base tomorrow or even secure a role.
No one can walk into any tech company without serious relevant skills and earn 6 figures, it is a myth.
No one can walk into any tech company without serious relevant skills and earn 6 figures, it is a myth.
Man of Honour
This.
Soldato
Ll lol
we said walk into £60k but yeh
They won't walk into anything without appropriate experience or skills.
The big tech industry can pick the best talent, it's why it rewards so well.
Where I work we are looking at hiring fresh grads into junior or associate SE roles for £40-50k, with the expectation that they will graduate to standard SE level on ~£80k after 2 years. So not quite "no skills" but definitely on that trajectory. Hiring SEs is really difficult, as it requires a combination of technical ability, business analyst skills, sales accumen and the ability to present confidently to a varied audience. Part of the reason why we're having to create a grad program is that it's incredibly difficult to find people with that mix of skills.
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Grads are a little different and there will always be grad programs for such things but as you say the combination is often challenging to find. Just understanding how software works, being able to build deployable systems, is not what being an SE is about. They need, as you say, a broader level of competences, often having done the job the people they are selling to do. Having that 'done the job' experience, married to understanding use case for tech and able to bring that to life whilst being able to make the complex simple to understand is vital but not easy to find. They also need to deep dive into the technical aspects and bring in wider teams as and when needed and ideally cover off the technical audience whilst the sales lead owns the wider business discussions.
Every good sales person in tech will have good SE's around them.
Soldato
Well they do as I’ve hired several.
We have had two people who were personal trainers who came in as analyst SEs and are SEs on 120k+ within 2 years.
We had a PE teacher come in as an analyst se and is a manager of ses within 18 months on 100k.
None of the above had any skills but a side hobby for tech and the right personal skills.
Sure not just anyone will be picked up and the market is a bit slow to recruit currently but the opportunities do exist for people without any hard qualifications.
They should do, and in my experience the best account execs are the ones that form good relationships with their SE over the long term. The trouble is the IT industry, and specifically cyber in my case and very specifically the cyber SE role, has a lot of vacancies at the moment which means companies are cannibalising each other's SEs which is driving up salaries. One of the SEs on my team handed his notice in to move to another semi-competitor and not only was he offered a significant pay rise to stay (which he accepted) everyone else on the team got significant pay bumps as well to ward off any possible interest - we're talking 20-30% uplifts on top of normal merit/cost of living raises.
It's bonkers, but it's a consequence of having 4 million vacancies in cyber worldwide (or 6 million or 10 million depending which report you read).
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Where do you work and who can I send my CV to?
That's crazy.
Good question, see also how are all those 22-year-olds from Accenture adding much to a big IT project when they don't even work for a vendor and what is the McKinsey guy adding by asking some standard questions and then repeating the answers back to management?
At the vendor I worked for they were called "pre-sales consultants" and AFAIK generally they didn't have people with no experience/knowledge in those roles, though they also earned a lot more than 60-80k.
We did however have fresh grads working in consultant roles assisting with implementations, they'd never be sent to a client site by themselves at that level though but rather would be shadowing/assisting an experienced consultant - basically configuring the software, writing specs for customisations, raising support tickets for issues encountered etc..
I presume the vendors that employ inexperienced people in a pre-sales/SE role are selling perhaps less expensive, less complicated software or solutions that may be a bit more commodified/standardised. If a sale is potentially worth say 10 or 20 million and has ongoing maintenance fees of 2 million a year + potential additional revenue from customisations etc. then it perhaps reflects a fair bit more complexity, implementation could be a 6-month or year-long process and the client may have multiple people who need to be pitched to so you could be flying out not just some pre-sales consultants but also may need to bring in say the product manager for X etc.. especially in the case where the current solution partially meets the client's needs but would require a fair bit of development work/customisation too.
It's a common trope that salespeople BS a bit to land a deal etc.. but at that sort of level you need to be very careful, you can't have some chumps promising everything just to close a deal; you do need people who can give realistic answers about what can be done even if in some cases that may be something currently under development. You can get away with telling the sales/pre-sales guy - don't focus on this too much in the demo, these buttons don't work/this functionality isn't present(yet!), only use this screen in this order etc.. re: features currently still in development, it is another thing entirely if they BS about stuff that will never be supported.
Here's a job ad for Cisco:
About You
To be a successful Sales Engineer at Cisco AppDynamics, you don’t need to have experience as a sales engineer. Anyone with a desire to be in customer-facing role and can demonstrates a passion and a curiosity for solving technology and business problems can be successful. You are ambitious, self-motivated, and ideally have experience with performance management technologies and techniques and cloud native architecture.
Other qualifications we are looking for include:
5+ years relevant experience of which 3-5 years’ experience working with at least one of the following languages: Java, .NET, PHP, JavaScript
1+ years experience working with IaaS and PaaS offerings in one or more of the following cloud service providers: Azure, AWS, GCP.
Conceptual knowledge of cloud native architecture.
Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Passionate about technical sales and working with customers.
Ambitious and self-motivated with a high emotional IQ.
Experience and competence working at OS command lines including Unix, Linux and Window command prompts.
Experience with Unix/Linux/Windows shell scripting.
Knowledge of basic networking components and concepts. Ability to troubleshoot basic networking issues that may prevent communication between hosts.
Experience with web servers and common relational databases used in today's application architectures. Ability to understand SQL.
Ability to work on multiple opportunities concurrently.
Desired Experience & Skills:
Experience with application performance management technologies and techniques.
Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and/or OpenShift.
Conceptual knowledge of OpenTelemetry and, more broadly, Observability.
Experience with common .NET web application architecture frameworks, distribution mechanisms and messaging components such as NET, ASMX, WCF, MSMQ, etc.
Experience with common Java web application architecture frameworks, distribution mechanisms and messaging components such as servlets, struts, Spring, EJB, web services, RMI, JMS, MQ-Series, etc.
About You
To be a successful Sales Engineer at Cisco AppDynamics, you don’t need to have experience as a sales engineer. Anyone with a desire to be in customer-facing role and can demonstrates a passion and a curiosity for solving technology and business problems can be successful. You are ambitious, self-motivated, and ideally have experience with performance management technologies and techniques and cloud native architecture.
Other qualifications we are looking for include:
5+ years relevant experience of which 3-5 years’ experience working with at least one of the following languages: Java, .NET, PHP, JavaScript
1+ years experience working with IaaS and PaaS offerings in one or more of the following cloud service providers: Azure, AWS, GCP.
Conceptual knowledge of cloud native architecture.
Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Passionate about technical sales and working with customers.
Ambitious and self-motivated with a high emotional IQ.
Experience and competence working at OS command lines including Unix, Linux and Window command prompts.
Experience with Unix/Linux/Windows shell scripting.
Knowledge of basic networking components and concepts. Ability to troubleshoot basic networking issues that may prevent communication between hosts.
Experience with web servers and common relational databases used in today's application architectures. Ability to understand SQL.
Ability to work on multiple opportunities concurrently.
Desired Experience & Skills:
Experience with application performance management technologies and techniques.
Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and/or OpenShift.
Conceptual knowledge of OpenTelemetry and, more broadly, Observability.
Experience with common .NET web application architecture frameworks, distribution mechanisms and messaging components such as NET, ASMX, WCF, MSMQ, etc.
Experience with common Java web application architecture frameworks, distribution mechanisms and messaging components such as servlets, struts, Spring, EJB, web services, RMI, JMS, MQ-Series, etc.
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Man of Honour
Perfect, I'll tell my nephew to apply. He's 18 and did a shift at a builder's merchant once but the dust got in his eyes and annoyed him so he never went back. The above sounds ideal other than he can't do any of it.
We also recruit Pre Sales Solutions Engineers; whilst they don't need to have been an SE before, they equally can't just walk in off the street with no credentials and experience and land that role.
Heck, I interview plenty of Salesforce Administrators who DO have qualifications and experience and want to be SEs or Consultants, and I'd say their success ratio in those and scenarios is probably about 5% at most.
Man of Honour
I know; I'm the one implementing what they've sold!
Caporegime
Wait, what?
I would argue that's a bad advert for an SE, because it doesn't ask for any of the non-technical skills that are required. But I don't work for Cisco though so maybe they have a different way of working. If we put out the equivalent kind of advert we might get a reasonable set of candidates with technical skills, but in my experience they would fall apart when asked to present and defend a solution and handle all of the typical objections that we'd expect as part of a sales process. This is how I landed in my role as I found out years after getting hired, I was the 'backup' candidate but I handled the presentation form of the interview much better whereas the other guy fell apart.
I don't think you could take an 18 year old failed builder and make an SE out of them but you could take someone with minimal qualifications (meaning an undergrad degree in CS/cyber or 2-3 years equivalent job experience) who has the confidence and personality to stand up in a pressurised sales environment, put them through a 2-3 year technical training program to bring those skills up to scratch, and end up with a decent SE.
kitkat9933's example of a PE teacher becoming an SE doesn't surprise me, that kind of person will have good non-technical skills and the confidence to handle a large crowds at the very least.
The other option, to hire people with 5-10 years experience technical experience and try and teach them the "business" side of things, is very hit and miss in my experience. You might find a gifted techie but when you ask them to stand up in front of a CISO to present a solution or build a rapport with customers they just can't do it, and that kind of skill is very difficult to teach. Another problem we have is that "gifted techies" are getting more and more expensive and there's still no guarantee that they will have the non-technical skills needed - so a trainee program starts to look like the better option.
That would be an incorrect presumption in our case at least, although we usually start junior SEs at the lower end of the market before trusting them to move up to FTSE 100 clients.
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Sounds like I'm perfect for the roles you have, I'm not joking, how do I apply?
Ironically though I do wonder if kitkat is talking about something along those lines, salesforce was one of thing things I suspected, commodified software from a big company that, while configurable, probably doesn't have the same options for customisation (as in specific code changes for clients) as smaller vendors offering more bespoke stuff at a high ticket price.
Also, successful personal trainers have a sales aspect to their job and competent PE teachers have to have people skills both could probably work in some form of sales/account management type role, similarly, former teachers can do well as standup comedians too.
So I guess someone who is confident/has high EQ but also keen and is at least smart enough to go through some X week "certification" in some commodified software solution perhaps can act as a "sales engineer".
Whereas a large, complex solution perhaps in say banking/finance requires pre-sales/SE types who not only know how to use the various aspects of the software as different types of users - traders, risk managers, operations etc. but also configure them, also have domain knowledge and also be familiar with/in touch with development/product management re: possible additional code changes/enhancements required to fit a client's requirements.