A Senior Developer Colleague Moved to Sales. Why?
After about eighteen years in development he moved to sales, arguing vibe coding lets anyone write code while few can still build a real product.
The next career is not development
Late last year he decided that if there was a next career, it wouldn't be as a developer. A career like his usually ends in an engineering executive seat or a lab director title, and becoming an executive is its own way of putting the keyboard down. Separately from any of that, he was tired of development itself.
The irony is that the trend runs the other way. The masters he respects, the ones who left the field burnt out years ago, are coming back to hands-on work now that the AI era lets them build things directly again.
Everyone codes, but not anyone can build
This was the point he pressed hardest: developer work doesn't disappear in the AI era, it moves toward a world where only the good ones 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 the competition got harder? Not quite. The problem is that people mistake programming for something easy now, when development itself used to be the barrier, back when even a rough product found buyers. You can still sell something simple on an idea alone, but a real product takes serious knowledge and nobody's accumulating that much of it anymore. So they can't build the real thing, and they think they can.
It isn't only a developer problem. Non-developers assume anyone can build now, that AI handles all of it, and they ship broken products on that assumption, which is leveling down rather than up. He got tired of it, and he's been saying the same thing since last year: the AI era asks for more study and more intelligence, and just starting to build is exactly the wrong move.
Not wanting to prove himself again
Abroad he sees the opposite selection running, where the better and smarter people survive, the ones overflowing with ideas or quick to learn. In Korea he watches people see that and take it as proof they can do it too. His own asset is knowledge, about eighteen years of it, which makes guiding other people the better seat. So last year he was weighing technical consulting against technical education. He wanted sales as well, but nobody gets a shot at sales. Then a seat opened and he took it.
I have been proving myself all this time. I do not want to start a whole new proof again.
The old him would have pushed down his own road anyway. Now he wants to wait for the verdict, right or wrong, because he might well be wrong. And like the masters coming back, he can always go back too.
On being a non-major, and domains
He didn't study computer science, and that never felt like freedom to him. What does the major matter when nothing you learn in school gets used at work? He came into development sideways: he loved coding, and as an image processing engineer he had to turn papers into code, which suited him perfectly. Somewhere in there he fell for the mechanism of building, taking knowledge you studied and weaving it into something your own hands made.
He never committed to a domain and just followed whatever each company happened to focus on. People say becoming a domain expert pays, and he never tied himself down anyway.
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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.
