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I started taking free classes through Coursera and, despite the difficulty, I loved the challenge. How did you go about making the shift? And how specifically did you choose your new career? Plus, I drink a whole heck of a lot less. I may never achieve the wealth of a VP of Sales but I sleep better at night and feel a sense of fulfilment I never thought possible. It requires almost the exact opposite mindset of a salesman. We start simply, add complexity and test for competency.

It's like collaborating on a work of art. The work never feels redundant, but builds upon the current application's scope.

We use an agile approach, meaning we go through continuous iterations of the project.

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Software doesn't work like that (at least for me). It was, in its entirety, disincentivising. It either stayed at the current level or increased based on the number of deals over the line I was for the month. Enjoy the victory temporarily, then repeat the entire cycle next month (as I had a quota to hit). Sales for me worked like this: take a list of prospects, warm them up, vet the truly interested, discard the time wasters, thin the pipeline for closable deals, hound the interested leads, follow up relentlessly, then finally get the deal closed. I sometimes miss the face-to-face interactions of sales, but that's nothing compared to the intrinsic value of building something from scratch. What do you miss and what don't you miss?

Coding has revealed to me that the work itself will provide all of the validation I'll ever need.

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It is nice to control the full length of the cycle and see my work affect an enterprise-level application. I like building, destroying and rebuilding.

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Now, even when someone rejects my code changes or asks for revisions, I'm OK with it. With sales, someone is always over your shoulder.

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I never thought this possible given my other professional experiences. I also get to work for extended periods on my own. Although I'm a part of a team of engineers and we require collaboration before any code changes can go live, I still get to decide how something is going to be built. So, I vowed to learn the trade to no longer have to rely on flaky developers. I realised he wasn't doing anything that I couldn't do. I was trying to collaborate with a developer on a personal application and the developer was stonewalling me. When was the moment you decided to make the change? And as long as I had the technical skill, the sky was the limit. Those ideas were mine – I could build them, mould them. The prospect of seeing my ideas take shape was almost like the prospect of breathing life into inanimate objects. The only barrier to entry is your own personal abilities. You can take an idea, construct a minimum viable product and test your hypothesis with real-time user feedback with very little overhead cost. It's the modern-day industrial revolution. I had friends who worked in software and I got to see first-hand how powerful software engineering can be. Software is the modern means of constructing something wonderful. I am at my most inspired when I can build. It eventually felt pointless to chase the same fleeting high and simply cash a commission cheque rather than work on something more tangible. Despite the initial high from closing a deal, there was nothing afterwards to sustain me. The problem was more the hollowness of the enterprise. On the contrary, there was something quite fulfilling about listening to a customer's needs, digesting the information then presenting a solution and seeing them sign on the dotted line. It wasn't that the work didn't present a challenge. Sales, although quite lucrative and temporarily entertaining, was too meretricious for my liking. How did you feel about your work before you decided to make a change? I work for SPS Commerce, a corporation that produces cloud-based supply chain management software. I worked in account management (sales) for a brewery.