My bf(29M) and I(28F) met in the same company. I since left but he’s still there. He makes about $130k in tech sales. I make $180k as a cloud architect. He likes to complain because his commission compensation was reduced and the pre sales engineers got a raise. I know it’s because a lot of sales people were writing really aggressive contracts that led to unhappy customers and now the guidelines for sales has made it harder to make sales. My bf use to make $40k more so he’s a bit pissed about that although to me it’s just the natural downturn in the tech sector.
He was talking shit about how all presales engineers do is talk about products on PowerPoint and don’t do any actual work that makes the customer sign. I got annoyed because he doesn’t know anything about tech and most presales engineers I use to work at had 4-8 years of software development experience not to mention very specific training on the products before they got to be making that salary. I have 2 years of support experience 3 years of software dev experience before I made 180k and my bf only has sales experience so to discount with how much knowledge is needed is pretty shitty. He said he knows some coding and could take their jobs.
I told him since he thinks he thinks he knows their role he should be able to pass a junior coding interview and technical questions. He agreed and said loser pays for dinner and I agreed. I got some interview questions and coding questions like fizz buzz and hash map coding questions.
He couldn’t answer a single question not even things like what’s a difference between Java and Python, explain what the OSI layers are, what caching is and the craziest one is what’s the difference between SAAS and IAAS which he definitely should know because he is selling SAAS products. I had 10 very basic questions and he couldn’t answer a single one. He also did make any of the code run.
He was pissed and argued with me the entire time but I googled things to prove he wasn’t right he would sulk and didn’t pay to dinner.
I was kind of bitter he didn’t pay for dinner and when a friend of his came over a week later I told him about it and we had a good laugh because he always likes to complain how easy engineers have it while he has to travel and boasts how he could do their jobs easily. He was there and yelled at me later for humiliating him.
Yeah, you're definitely the asshole for bringing this up to his friend a week later, just so you can laugh at him. What the hell?
Also, recognize that taking a 25% pay cut can be very demoralizing. He's probably not feeling very validated by your "meh, kinda makes sense" attitude about it. Try empathizing with his situation a little more instead of being so focused on proving him wrong. He probably already knows he can't do the other job and is just lashing out in frustration.