Why I considered shifting my career from engineering to sales

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This post could have been a good first post, but I was so past that stage that I already wanted to share all the ins and outs of the commercial world. Though this might not apply to you, this is my own personal mental path that I went through before I made my decision to leave engineering and move to the "dark side" (this is what technical people refer to the commercial department). I will try my best to keep this post below 500 words and will elaborate in the book.


First of all, living in Quebec; the system is made so that employees are over taxed to the point that they sometimes try to establish a startup because taxes for SME are about half the tax employees pay. This constant pressure is intentional to create jobs and it is working I should say. This constant state of mind pushed me to explore the skills necessary to start a business.

How is that related ? Well the skills a commercial person has are very similar to what an entrepreneur manifests, so basically, commercial tasks seem more appealing to me unconsciously.

Then there is my engineering job, stuck behind a computer eight hours a day doing pretty much the same thing over and over again. This is unfortunately the situation with engineering consultants that started to hit my nerves over time.

However, the thing about being a consultant, I quickly realized that I was a "cost" to the company who charged a per hour price to clients for the services I am rendering. This means that the smaller is my salary I get, the more commission the sales person gets which is based on profit margins. This sense of being taken advantage of started a little rebellious fire inside of me that kept growing as I became more and more important as I was advancing in my engineering career. More importantly, I wanted the reward that is directly related to my performance. I was fed up of always having to prove myself all over again to get that minuscule raise. If I improved efficiency by 50%, I wanted the direct reward for it. Basically, I wanted a variable rate financial compensation. Note: I will briefly write about variable compensation in a future post.

In addition, there are many "commercial" decisions that the engineering team didn't quite understand as they were counter productive in an engineering sense. You guessed it, the more hours billed (sometime overtime), the more the commission the sales person got. Now this is fine as it allowed me and the team to have a job for many years, which is a good thing. So what's wrong with that? ....Nothing really! I just felt like I should be the one benefitting from my work and be on the other side of the coin!

I really wanted to know who are the "movers", and how they were thinking. There is also the prestige of being the "mover", the one negotiating and bringing in more business to the company. In the case of working for a big company, these important people are no longer numbers nor billable hour production workers, they are the ones bringing in the big bucks!

This blog post sums it up pretty well.