How to break into sales engineer role?

I showed up at Sun Microsystems when an opening arose. I had no experience with sales but a lot of experience with the hardware and admin. One job had me supporting hundreds of university users. Another put me on enterprise servers for an investment company.

I also worked in aerospace, so writing proposals was old hat, and surprised my boss that I could work one up quickly.

I thought it was helpful and appreciated that I WAS a customer for so long and could relate strongly to other customers. Especially at previous employers. It was great working with a super sales rep. My first day on the job, we flew to Chico to meet customers. But ( you saw this coming ) she was so damn good that she left after a while, and I filled in briefly, helped by two young reps from SoCal. Her replacement had no Sun experience or knowledge. I left a while later but it was a blast configuring systems and talking with customers and internal folks. Business fell off badly after I left ( not because I left! ) so staying might have been a rough ride.

I am grateful that the rep and the district manager had the confidence in me that I could expand from straight engineering to being part of a sales team. I still have the awesome Java jacket.

What on earth does this term mean?

If you sell - you’re just a salesman.

If you engineer — you’re an engineer.

I bet Geogre Carlin would make a great joke about it, but really Im wondering what is this role about?

I'm an introvert, but have always been "that guy" willing to go onsite (pre-covid) and/or get on calls with clients. More time on calls and less time coding over a year or two. That turned into a post-sales implementation engineer role where I was basically professional services. At my current company they cancelled the post sales program and rolled us all into sales engineering.

I like the tech and meeting different people / use cases. I don't like the AEs and the vomit of acronyms and jargon that comes with the sales side of the house, although I guess you could say Salesforce is no worse than Jira/wikis that developers are familiar with.

Overall I enjoy it; I was a mediocre software engineer and the competition for SWE roles is damn tough. There are fewer tech folks who are ok with being on client calls for most of the day so it's a good niche. That said I do feel like my skills have atrophied a bit and there's not a clear path for growth. I'd love if someone who has been doing this for 20+ years could chime in :)