Engineering, Developing et al.
The Technical Underbelly
🔥Enough to be Dangerous
Talk tech, don’t code it, so you can talk about all kinds of other stuff.
The Technical Underbelly
A high-level deep dive into a web, SaaS, or cloud concept
Engineering/Software Engineering/ Coding/Programming/Developing
Growing up most definitely not a “math person,” I used to completely shut down at the mere word engineering, overtaken by visions of of Matt Damon (actually, nice!) in Good Will Hunting scribbling unintelligible Greek letters and numbers on a whiteboard, flashes of calculus classes beyond my reach and a failed attempt at high school physics.
You can imagine my intimidation when later in life I landed a job as a Solutions Consultant aka a Sales Engineer.
So if I of all people could be an engineer of some sort … what was it? And what are all these engineering-adjacent terms people use when talking about “devs”?
Per usual, I took a linguistic approach to understanding the field of engineering and and the SaaS-specific discipline of software engineering. While these terms are often used interchangeably in the real world and in practice you may not find such clear cut divisions, they are conceptually helpful to define in isolation.
Engineering: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to the design, development, and optimization of processes, products, and systems.
Coding: Writing computer instructions in a programming language in order to create a program or app that performs specific tasks.
Developing: Establishing or creating an application or system from scratch through coding and testing.
Programming: Developing complex logic within software applications by writing code.
Software Engineering: A branch of engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software.
Engineering and its off shots in SaaS
In SaaS Sales, there’s a clear career progression from Sales Development Representative (SDR) to Strategic Enterprise Account Executive. The more prefixes to the AE title signify more experience in navigating more complex deals, organizational customer hierarchies, and more intricate sales cycles.
In SaaS Engineering, engineers progress from Junior Engineer up to Staff Engineer and beyond through gaining experience in larger, more complex software projects and picking up new tech stacks or skillsets like emerging programming languages, mobile development, or AI/ML competencies (See Engineering Career Paths for more).
While the job titles might not be “coder” and lines blur depending on company size, you can look at these words and see the kind of progression that “software builders” acquire through their tenure. They start off learning to code, move onto developing more intricate applications through programming with logic and algorithms. A software engineer looks beyond the code of their one layer of the stack or specific product area to design a system that works as a whole.
In the SaaS industry, software engineers do not just code all day. They work in multidisciplinary teams of designers, data scientists, and project managers to figure out the best approaches to support their processes, projects, and output. They collaborate on their own teams with other software engineers to review code, outline designs, and research initiatives. Software does boil down to code, but just like bridges and highways and curricula, it needs to be articulated, designed, and implemented with strategy and orchestration.
Think of a sentence like "if not for his shrewd engineering, the election would have been lost." As I’m sure any engineer can tell you, there’s a lot more creativity to it than our ingrained stereotypes of engineers may have you think. In my experience as a sales engineer, I was definitely engineering, orchestrating and devising systems that went well beyond the pretty little interface of a modern SaaS application to design a solution that would create an ecosystem.
In Case You Missed It
Last week’s Shortlisted: Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why we need more Boutique Search Engines by Sari Azout, founder of Startupy
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Up next week, it’s Stay Savvy - curated links and commentary at the intersection of tech, business, and culture.
Alice Egan, Founder & Educator, SaaS Savvy.
I teach B2B SaaS salespeople the technical SaaS + cloud concepts they need to sell SaaS smarter + talk tech with confidence. Learn about my online course.