Job Hunting

Got headhunted by Sailpoint this week and they were pretty aggressive about it. I am actually very happy in my current position but this would be an almost ~$170k/year job as a Staff Reliability Engineer.

I have not directly done reliability but the guy says my mix of experience is very ideal for what they need. So what the hell I'll take the call.

Wrecked the first interview. Director was really cool and the position actually does sound like something up my alley.

I've been working for the past year on designing scaling systems for the business side of the company. This would be similar except from the tech ops perspective. I'd be on a team of 20 or so leading 6 of them. It'd be less development intensive than my previous few jobs.

Long haul to the offer still and I only took this call because I don't want to go into my next job hunt as rusty at interviews as I was previously. I am concerned with my rustyness in performance testing because its now been quite a while since I've done it and I've never worked on performance engineering in scaling cloud environments. Which is a pretty big issue in today's architecture world. When I was at GM I was just behind the times on that because they didn't use it.

But I will absolutely kill the rest of the interview stuff they throw at me so who knows.

All that said... what is all of y'alls opinion on bailing a job you've not even been at for 2 years and its a job you really really like? I absolutely love working at a smaller company and while Sailpoint is a bit bigger it's still not Big Corporate. So that's fine I guess. I don't really want to leave my current job that at all and they just promoted me and gave me an additional raise (that I demanded). But I don't see myself getting into a leadership position here I guess. This would be like a $55k salary increase in addition to a leadership role doing what I currently like to do. If I got it.

Prodigal said:

I’ve been going through Indeed and LinkedIn looking for jobs - things getting progressively worse at my job and I don’t want to end up wasting away in prison for beating one or more of these idiots senseless. My problem is my previous two decades of experience are in manufacturing, and I don’t want another job in manufacturing.

Feels bad man.

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So I don't know anything about your situation but if you want to pivot you can always pivot to a sales position. If you like doing sales and talking to people and whatnot. While I work in tech our sales department moves quickly. This seems to apply to most sales positions I've encountered. While it may start small you can move up quickly.

If you want to pivot to tech, and I can't stop recommending this to people, get a certification as a Salesforce Administrator. The SFDC ecosystem is highly employable. You can knock out a cert in 90 days or so if you're motivated. It isn't glamourous but it sure is better than starting at the help desk. Which is where many people start as, "IT." It starts around $60k a year in Austin and the only way is up. Senior Admins up to around $80k, Developers $100k+, and Architects $200k or more.

As it is afoot in the door so to speak it would also open the door to all kinds of other tech opportunities.

Araysar said:

I heard this a lot about SF.

Last year, I did an experiment with this to get my wife to pivot over to SalesForce. She is in purchasing/forecasting for a specific industry and the job mobility (geographically in US) is limited, so I was trying to get her to pivot over to something with broader appeal and demand so that we're not tied to only 3-4 cities in US. Oh, and her job is not normally done remotely, so she has to be at the facility. So, very limited number of cities with openings for her, plus you almost have to live in same area.

I have a pretty solid LinkedIn profile, thousands of endorsements, very well optimized for LI's search algos. I have no problems getting regular inquiries from recruiters, etc. So I updated my profile to include the SalesForce admin cert, added various SalesForce keywords to my profile, bought 200 endorsements to max out a pair of SalesForce skills on my profile at 99+, etc. and then applied to a bunch of entry level SF jobs. Did that for 2-3 weeks, got no hits on applications and no recruiter ever reached out to me on LI. Up until the COVID layoffs started, I was typically getting 1-2 inquiries per week for my current field, but was getting nothing for my supposedly new career path.

I still feel like its a legitimate pivot, I'm just wondering what I screwed up and if anyone has any tips on how to make this pivot more successful. I'm pretty happy where I am, but...
1. It doesnt hurt to have a separate career path to fall back on if my current field takes a shit, and since its a simple cert, I got no problems in investing time into it.
2. I need to get my wife out of her current industry just so I can get the fuck out of LA and move to wherever I want to, so we can both be remote workers.

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I have the SFDC Admin Cert and I'm about to get the SFDC Developer Cert. End goal being Dev Cert 2 and maybe advanced admin cert but who knows. If I get this job I am talking about I'll probably need to abandon it though. I was a developer for a long time and my primary role is data-oriented. At this company, I completely redesigned our data warehouse, developed an in house ETL application, and some other stuff. Leading to saving a lot of money, time, and exposing unsecured revenue streams. Since then I've moved into Salesforce Development to continue my role of developing stuff for the business side of the company. Currently working on integrating our SAAS product to the google cloud marketplace and product fulfillment features directly into Salesforce.

I in my effort to do a few interviews a year to not be rusty I've applied to multiple SFDC jobs and they all responded to me. This is specifically for SFDC developer jobs though as I don't really have an interest in doing admin work. Outside of developer you want to focus on the SFDC specialties like CPQ (Config, Quote, Cash), SFDC Healthcare, or something like that. IMO you specifically can probably just do the Dev work and go from there. Admins do not only do admin work even if they're called that. A lot of them develop frontend processes for CPQ and shit and that demands higher salaries. We've hired consultants JUST for CPQ in the past which is how our admins even learned how to do it. So specialize as much as you can and get more opportunities. To be an architect you need to be certified by a very arcane SFDC process that requires a company board reviewing your project. Setup an entire Org and list of requirements in it all by yourself. It apparently takes as long to get as a master's degree. Like anything just getting the cert and being fresh will prob be a little harder getting a job than someone with any experience.

My team has 3 SFDC admins skilled in CPQ, MEDIPICC (whatever the fuck that is), and some other stuff. But none of them can develop Apex so that's where I've been. I've personally found it enjoyable to learn SFDC stuff because the platform is quite expansive and quirky. I originally hated all of the stupid shit SFDC does that is completely counter to the entire field of software engineering. But I've since found it kind of fun. I also commend them for the mountain of available information so you can teach yourself just about anything about SFDC with no paid training necessary. The SFDC Stack overflow and discord channels are exceptionally good.

The SFDC platform is central to every single aspect of the business side of our company. From finance to training. It's almost alarming. There is absolutely no way we could function without it and this goes for most places using SFDC. Which is why it pays. And is very friendly to being 100% remote.

Prodigal said:

Thanks TJT , going to research SFDC. I’ve been approached about sales in current job and by other acquaintances - just don’t have the disposition for it.

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I hear ya man. Neither do I lol. I couldn't do sales at all. No patience for it. Sales engineering maybe.

This is the official training site. Trailhead | The fun way to learn you can learn all you need for the admin cert on there for free. It's what I did. Their trainings are really good and be sure to utilize the stackoverflow and ESPECIALLY the discord Join the SF Exchange Discord Discord Server!

Prodigal said:

On it - yeah this is a lot of what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years, building databases and pulling data out of other databases (primarily AS400 stuff) to develop reports that actually tell me something. So hopefully that experience + a certification and a portfolio once I’ve got it down will get me started.

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You can probably leverage SFDC Cert/DB skill and your knowledge of whatever manufacturing sector you're in to get a job on the business side of a similar company. Unless your industry is truly in the stone age when it comes to modern customer relationship management I guarantee they're using it out there somewhere. Or some similar manufacturing sector is.

3 hour zoom interview this week and that's the only round. Yay.

grumblethorn said:

I would encourage you to take it. That is a hell of a raise, and they are a good company.

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I am definitely doing the interview. No idea if I'll actually get the job though. I have the impression this will not be a whiteboarding interview and shit though so that's fine.

grumblethorn said:

Sales engineering fucking sucks. Those sales assholes blur the line so much you rarely are doing the tech portion of the process. fuck em.

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So on this, I can only speak for sales engineers at my company. But they only handle the technical portion. But depending on the customer that can be a really tall order. Our product is extremely not user friendly even if you're an experienced developer. If you have some bizarre use case you'll need to figure it out on your own as an SE without any help a lot of the time.

But when it comes to office titles I think its really out of control. We have shit like this but its not in order. There are Sales Engineer III who are senior to Senior Sales Enginneer II... I don't get how it works lol.

• Sales Engineer
  • Sales Engineer I
  • Sales Engineer II
  • Sales Engineer III
  • Senior Sales Engineer
  • Senior Sales Engineer II

Prodigal said:

Textiles, so pretty much Stone Age. What I do translates well as it’s supply chain/just in time/cash management focused. My biggest frustration is our leadership thinks having adversarial relationships between all of the departments makes for effective managing and accountability. They also implement incentives that encourage departments to focus only on their “trees”, forest be damned. I have told upper level management that if we spent as much time trying to solve problems as we do trying to figure out how to blame someone else for them we might get somewhere. Now they pretty much avoid me.

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Okay then yeah. After getting the cert and some practice under your belt you can come into a pretty strong position I think. SFDC Admins are all about increasing efficiency and reliability in the sales pipeline. To which someone with decades of experience in the sector can provide solid advice. Just start casually perusing companies in the same manufacturing sector and broaden a bit to similar or adjacent ones looking for SFDC related stuff. There's a lot of SFDC headhunters our there and contacting them probably wouldn't hurt.

If they ask about why you're switching just be upfront and say you wanted something different. In tech, they are usually cool with that. As always a career pivot will most likely mean a lower salary than you're used to. At least in the short term. Our junior SFDC admin got his advanced admin cert within the year he's been with us. Going from $58k to $78k just as an example. His route was a shitty hourly help desk job (never went to university) and found out about SFDC on the job. Started doing stuff for it, learning on the way. Eventually got his admin cert and started working at our company last year. Then got his Advanced Admin cert like 5 months ago.

The beauty here of building out a portfolio is that you can get 5 free orgs (instances) from SFDC.com itself to work on. I have a dev org I practice in all the time. If you build out CPQ, MEDIPICC in there, and can show it to people it will really help. Much easier than having a GitHub of random garbage you had to think up and create. There are things out there people want to see and just point it out. Check it, I made this entire CPQ flow built on MEDIPICC principles and this is how I did it.

Meh 50/50 on it. I have no experience with Microservice style architecture and I was up front about it.

So we'll see how much that matters.