Hi fellow mustachians
I was conducting my happy and relatively calm life as a function developer / system engineer (writing control algorhitm, state estimator, designing plant models and such). It is a nice cozy job where I get to use many things I learned at the university.
Then, out of the blue, a company contacted me through Linkedin and asked me if I was interested for an opening. They knew I was working with their product and wanted to know if I was interested in becoming a techincal expert to support their process of sales. Preparing small demonstration, travelling, talk to potential customers, dissipating their technical concerns.
I know that many things comes into play (salary, commute, vacation time, etc) but for the moment I would like to hear about people who made a similar switch...did you miss being a developer? Implementing your own ideas and bringing a product into the market? Did you regret going for sales?
Did somebody switch back from sales to development? I would think is a little bit more difficult if you were out of the industry for years.
I would like to hear opinions about the nature of the job, without thinking about the rest, but for completion of informations:
- I'll get a 10% raise minimum (maybe more, is still not defined)
- My commute by train and bike will shorten by 20 min each way (from 55 to 35 min)
- I'll have to work 15 minutes less a day (42 hr week instead of 43.5)
- I'll have 5 weeks vacation instead of 6 and less religious festivity (2-3 additional day per year)
- I'll be travelling 10% of the time (but I'll be home every evening, small european country) + a couple of weeks per year in another country (I have an 8 month daughter, so I would hate to go away for a long time)
- today I can more or less wear anything that resemble clothes, in the new job it will be suits and shirts
- at the moment I find my job fascinating, but sometime I really hate developing in front of a screen all day long. There are days where I practically don't talk to anybody and I'm staring at the screen 10 hours. I don't have a problem in talking in public, doing presentation and the such, so that would be a nice change.
I'm very torn at the moment, my colleagues are fantastic and right now that I'm the middle of the interview everybody is coming to me with great new ideas for new stuff to do in the nex months/years and I actually feel sick at my stomach and kind of want to throw out....