The "coping story" paragraph stung in a useful way. I once spent six weeks proving an old billing service had to be retired and got nowhere, then a staff engineer made the same case in two slides and it shipped. For a year I told myself it was politics. Going back through the old thread, the real difference was that he had framed it as the company's risk and I had framed it as my annoyance. That was not theater. That was me losing on the part of the job I had refused to learn.
Do most jobs converge into sales once you're senior enough?
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One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.
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The "coping story" paragraph stung in a useful way. I once spent six weeks proving an old billing service had to be retired and got nowhere, then a staff engineer made the same case in two slides and it shipped. For a year I told myself it was politics. G
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One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.
That word makes people flinch because they hear manipulation, cheap social theater. You hear sales and you imagine a used-car-salesman with a flashy jacket and a fake smile. But most senior roles turn partly more and more into sales. Sales in the narrower and more serious sense of trust transfer. The job now depends on getting other people to rely on your judgment enough to back a plan, fund a priority, join a team, accept a tradeoff, or move before the answer is obvious. You don't necessarily sell to customers, but you spend your time convincing this or that person to do what you want done. That's selling. Ideas.
That is what changes with seniority. Early in a career, most of the value sits in direct execution. You write the code, you build a model, you run the analysis, you design the thing. As scope expands, doing the thing is no longer enough. The work has to be approved, staffed, coordinated, defended, timed, explained, and kept alive across other people's objections. The person who cannot do that hits a ceiling and then wonders why excellence stopped compounding.
A good senior engineer makes the point concrete. At a junior level, he can just solve the technical problem in front of him. At a senior level, he has to persuade other engineers not to build three incompatible versions of the same future, persuade managers that one reliability tradeoff matters more than a short-term feature, and persuade adjacent teams that the pain of change now is cheaper than the pain of failure later. He is not selling because he has become fake. He is selling because the job now depends on whether other people buy his judgment.
That pattern shows up almost everywhere once responsibility widens, selling is just convincing people to spend resources (not always money) to buy or do something. Managers sell priorities upward and direction downward. Recruiters transfer confidence between people who do not yet trust each other. Founders sell in every direction at once. Not that every profession becomes identical. The point is that senior work increasingly depends on moving people, not just doing the craft in isolation.
I think many career ceilings are persuasion ceilings disguised as merit problems. The technically strong person often tells himself a flattering story: I am being held back because politics is fake and lesser people are better at theater. Sometimes that is true. A lot of the time it is a coping story. The job changed, while they did not. They still wants the authority of seniority without the burden of carrying other minds with him.
Maybe the word "sales" is a bit provocative. I still think it earns its keep because it strips away a lot of prestige language. We say influence, executive presence, stakeholder management, and strategic communication when what we often mean is simpler: other people have to buy your judgment before the work can move.
You don't need to dress flashy. Talk falsely. Used-car salesmen are, honestly, not the best at selling anything, usually you buy because you wanted a car in the first place. Great salesmen don't even feel like selling anything. If you want seniority, you are asking for a job that depends less on your own hands and more on your ability to move other people without lying to them. A lot of careers turn into that. Pretending otherwise does not stop the change from happening. It just leaves you training for the junior version of your own profession.
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genuinely asking, isn't the recruiter example kind of different from the rest? convincing three engineers not to build four backends is you arguing for a thing you believe. the recruiter one is just having a reputation two strangers can borrow. are those the same skill or did the post staple them together because both have the word trust in them?
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Half-agree, but I think the post mixes up being bad at this with not wanting to do it. Some of the people who hit the ceiling can clearly sell, they just refuse to spend their whole day doing it, and the post reads that refusal as a missing skill. Maybe the ceiling is a preference some of the time and a deficit the rest, and it only counts the second one. could be wrong.
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The strongest version of this is that senior work has to be "approved, staffed, coordinated, defended, timed, explained," and most engineers train only for the first verb. I will grant all of that. Where I would draw one careful line: explaining a tradeoff honestly so someone can decide is not the same act as moving them to a decision you already picked. The post folds both into "sales," and once it does, the word stops telling you which of the two you are actually doing on any given Tuesday.
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The line that holds up is "convincing other engineers not to build three incompatible versions of the same future." I have watched that exact fight, and the person who won it was not the loudest. He was the one who had quietly cleaned up the last three incompatible versions, so when he said don't, people remembered the cleanup. Selling judgment is real, but the inventory you sell from is just work nobody clapped for.
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The part the post skips is that this kind of selling runs on a budget. Every time you get a room to back your judgment you spend trust you cannot top up on demand, and you find out the limit the first time you sell something that does not pan out. So past a certain level the skill stops being how to win the meeting and becomes which meetings are worth spending on. I have watched good engineers go broke persuading people on things that did not matter, then have nothing left when the reliability fight the post mentions finally showed up.
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The line that lands for me is "buy your judgment before the work can move." That is most of my week. As a PM I am not really selling features, I am selling a sequence. The hard sell is never "this is a good idea," it is "this is the disappointment we are choosing on purpose, and here is why it is cheaper than the other disappointment." Half of stakeholder management is just deciding which letdown gets to be explicit. People who never learn that part keep waiting for a roadmap that makes everyone happy, and then act surprised when the silent disappointments come back as escalations later.
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"Training for the junior version of your own profession" is the cleanest insult I have read this quarter, mostly because it is aimed at me. The senior engineer who refuses to sell is just a very expensive intern with opinions.
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The "coping story" paragraph stung in a useful way. I once spent six weeks proving an old billing service had to be retired and got nowhere, then a staff engineer made the same case in two slides and it shipped. For a year I told myself it was politics. Going back through the old thread, the real difference was that he had framed it as the company's risk and I had framed it as my annoyance. That was not theater. That was me losing on the part of the job I had refused to learn.
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ok but the part where the sale REQUIRES "moving before the answer is obvious." yes. that is the whole job and also the trap. I once convinced an entire room to back a migration before we actually knew the answer. great selling. answer turned out to be no. the persuasion ceiling is real but so is the persuasion floor where you talk people into the wrong thing because you got good at talking. trust transfer cuts both ways and the second way is how outages get funded.
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From the side that runs the promotion committees, the post is describing what we are actually arguing about in the room, even when nobody uses the word sales. The case for a staff promotion is almost never "is the work good." It is whether other senior people will rely on this person's judgment without being asked to. The hard part is that this is exactly the criterion most likely to reward the persuasive over the correct, and a committee that does not guard against that promotes confidence and calls it leadership.
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