I arrived at the same realization as you--having sales as a skill is beneficial no matter the career path a person is on.
As developer of ~10 years experience, the path I took to get sales experience was to take a job as a sales engineer for a technical product in my software domain. It is the best career decision I have made so far.
My fear was that I would lose my technical knowledge, but I quickly realized that was not the risk I thought it was. I am consistently challenged by the breadth and depth of questions posed by each customer based on their unique needs. As a sales engineer, I learn more in my technical domain than I did at my last humdrum dev job.
And on top of that, of course, I get exposure and practice in this other side of the business and set of skills that was previously an enigma to me.
For me, sales engineering is the best of both worlds.
Thanks for posting this. I have a climate change related project that is getting traction and its needs are exceeding my ability to keep up with the dev work. Hopefully these communities have someone who would like to help. If anyone on HN is interested in helping, you can find details in my profile.
Coal's carbon dioxide pollution can be limited through carbon capture technology. The U.S. government recently incentivized power producers to implement this technology with the expanded 45Q tax credit. We'll see if it pencils out well enough for broad adoption.
These approaches get amplified by a price on carbon. If you are interested in convincing your Member of Congress to price carbon, take a look at the most effective organization doing this work: http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org
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Hiring across a variety of engineering teams and technologies.
You can join an advocacy group such as Citizens' Climate Lobby and build political will for a livable world. CCL has been incredibly successful by, for example, creating the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which counts among its membership 30 Republican members of Congress. CCL is effective and is volunteer driven, so the chapter in your area needs you.
How do we make renewables more competitive so that we can get our local utilities to invest in them?
A carbon fee and dividend. Price carbon at its true cost and let the market decide! There is important work being done by Citizen's Climate Lobby. CCL is incredibly effective, but we need the help of the creative minds and energies of HN. Check out citizensclimatelobby.org to get involved in your local chapter.
Until recently I would wring my hands and feel sad for a situation I couldn't change.
Several months ago, though, I joined the Citizen's Climate Lobby, which is building political will for a carbon tax and dividend (the only truly market-based approach to limiting green house gas emissions). I know that warming has happened and will happen due to past emissions. But at this point I feel I'm working to avoid the most disastrous scenarios by limiting future emissions.
I have been inspired by my involvement with this organization, and I encourage other concerned Hacker Newsers to consider joining.
The Climate Leadership Council is an organization of Republican Party elders with an extremely solid proposal to immediately reduce carbon emissions through a carbon fee, which is a market-based mechanism to reflect the true cost of carbon at the source.
Bitrise has been doing macOS VMs for CI for 10 years, so we extended the existing product to this use-case.