A Senior Developer Colleague Moved to Sales. Why?
The next career is not development
He decided late last year that if there was a next career, it would not be as a developer. The usual path for a career like his leads to an engineering executive seat or a lab director title, and becoming an executive is its own way of putting down the keyboard. Separately from all that, he was simply tired of development itself.
The irony is that the current trend runs the other way. The masters he respects, who once left the field in fatigue, are returning to hands-on work in the AI era, because they can finally build directly again.
Everyone codes, but not anyone can build
This was the point he pressed hardest: in the AI era, the work of developers does not disappear. It moves toward a world where only the skilled survive.
Vibe coding lets anyone write code. But it has become a world where, unless you are good, nobody can build a product.
Did he mean competition has intensified? No. The core is that people mistake programming for something easy now. Development itself used to be the barrier, so even a rough product could find buyers. You can still sell something simple on an idea alone. But a real product demands substantial knowledge, and people no longer accumulate that much of it. So they cannot build the real thing, and they believe they can anyway.
It is not only a developer problem. Non-developers too now assume anyone can build, that AI does it all, and produce broken products under that assumption. A kind of leveling down. He grew tired of it, and has been saying the same thing since last year: the AI era demands more study and more intelligence, and simply starting to build is exactly the wrong move.
Not wanting to prove himself again
Abroad, he sees the opposite selection: the better, smarter people survive, the ones overflowing with ideas or fast at learning. In Korea, he sees people watching that and mistaking it for proof that they can do it too. His own asset, he said, is knowledge: about eighteen years of experience, which makes guiding others the better position. So last year he was weighing technical consulting or technical education. He wanted sales too, but sales gives nobody a chance. Then a seat opened, and he moved.
I have been proving myself all this time. I do not want to start a whole new proof again.
In the old days he would have pushed down his own road anyway. Now he wants to watch until the verdict comes in, whether he was right or wrong, since he might well be wrong. And like the returning masters, he can always go back.
On being a non-major, and domains
He did not study computer science. Asked whether that ever freed him, he said no: what does the major matter when nothing learned in school gets used at work? He came into development sideways: he loved coding, and as an image processing engineer he had to be able to turn papers into code, which suited him perfectly. Along the way he fell for the mechanism of being a builder, the joy of weaving studied knowledge into something built by his own hands.
He never committed to one domain, instead following whatever domain each company focused on. People say becoming a domain expert pays, but he never tied himself to one.
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This post is based on a conversation with an 18-year senior developer before moving into technical sales. At his request, we are not naming him.
