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my biggest mistake was getting an education and not just staying a boat captain, i hate white collar work
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Unfortunately no one every offers to pay an actuary a $1 million bonus in one day to trade a bunch of toxic assets.
Yea I honestly have no idea what he makes, but he doesn’t love the traveling salesman role. But living in Des Moines I’m pretty sure he’s comfy whatever it is.
OK yeah from a quality of life perspective having to travel a bunch to make sales calls in the midwest does sound super super shitty.
The salary is for people who graduated with that degree. It doesn’t say what kind of work they’re doing to get the paycheck.
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Yeahhh, my friend did mention one of his former bosses broke off and started his own firm and he’s made an absolute killing. And he literally won’t retire just because he wants to stick it to his former company. They even tried to buy him out and he said no lol.
Yeah man I’ll be honest: the only reason I went to college was to have an easier time breaking into real B2B sales. I didn’t realize then that all I needed was to get 2-3 years older.
Being young and poor as me was a supremely frustrating experience. I was making literally every person I worked for absurd amounts of money and getting ridiculous scraps in return. Same thing that makes me who I am now made me who I was then, and who I’d still be if I hadn’t finally gotten my foot in the door.
Yeah definitely a lot of money to be made out there if you’re in the right industry and have the personality for it. And of course know what you’re talking about
Age wise the income distribution sucks. The young and new families are very poor while the 50-60 year olds have stacks of money that they don’t necessarily need. I know we talk about taxing the rich and spending on the poor but that plays across the ages as well. Fat cat 50 year olds with their boats, cars, and other toys could do with a bit less and the 20 something with nothing left after student loans or a 20 something with a new kid could use a bit more.
The industry almost doesn’t matter. You just need to be selling wholesale quantities to commercial customers and be the kind of person who can figure out how to solve a problem. I’d also recommend not having a wildly inferior product. It has to be the right decision in a certain kind of situation. Then you can focus on finding the people who it’s the right decision for and your close ratio goes to the moon.
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Yup I know and interact with plenty of people in that field and have been offered jobs quite a few times. Even though they would pay substantially more than my current role I never even considered them. Traveling tech service/sales is not the lifestyle I want and it wouldn’t work with my wife’s schedule anyway.
Yeah if you don’t need the money sales has some very significant drawbacks. It’s not very much ‘work’ in the sense of activity, but instead you’re signing up to get rejected many times per week for years. Emotionally it’s tough. Not as tough as playing poker for a living with a brain that doesn’t like giving you dopamine when you win, but tough.
And then there’s the travel, although I will say I’ve managed to totally dodge that and literally only had 3 work trips since 2016, and none of those were sales calls. I don’t even have to get in my car for work.
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Yes, having a product that actually does useful things is a big plus.
I work in sales engineering for enterprise software, the biggest thing IMO, what separates the OK people from the superstars, is the ability to figure out which deals actually have a chance of closing and which ones don’t, so you can spend time moving the good ones forward and ignore the bad ones.
The ability to do that requires a few things, but mostly it’s about listening. You have to not only figure out what the prospect’s actual problem is (so you can tell if the stuff on your truck might actually help them or not) but more importantly you have to listen to them to pick up on how urgent their need is, how motivated they are, do they actually have budget (or a solid line on it), do they have purchasing authority or influence with someone who does, etc.
If you can’t do this, you’re doomed. I’m currently with a company with bad product market fit, and I have maybe 20 solid leads in the funnel at the beginning of the quarter. I need to close maybe 6 of those to hit my number. If I have unlimited time, maybe 10 of those are potential wins, but I don’t have unlimited time. If I can’t pare that 20 down to a managable number I’m turbofucked.
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At my kids’ school, instead of asking kids to buy a bunch of school supplies, they ask parents to cut the school a check so the teachers can buy supplies for the whole classroom. This year they’re asking for $225 per kid. In the past, they’ve shared a list of all the different things this is supposed to pay for, but this year the email says “because these funds support a variety of needs, we are not sharing class-specific supply lists this year.” This is a public school mind you. Just wanted to check if this is another NYC oddity or if it happens in other school districts.
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The school or the PTA/Ed Foundation? I don’t think the actual school asked for anything at our kids school, but the Ed Foundation asked for $2000/kid.
We have a “give the PTA a lump sum and they will give everyone supplies” situation. No itemized list.
The school supply money goes to the PTA, but this is in addition to the four-figure annual donation that they ask for that funds things like assistant teachers
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Holy chirst, when did schools get that dysfunctional? When I was a kid we just showed up and there was always plenty of paste to eat.
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it totally depends on the place you end up. there is lots of applied science at startups now, which usually comes with equity. a few stints with options, and you could make a couple million after taxes.
there are also huge sciencey consortiums, sometimes private, where the equity play is replaced with a company-wide bonus structure. it can make your otherwise stable and average salary into a comfortably sized savings account.