It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing.
Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
Sales engineers have to be good enough to bluff their way through the layers of hyperbole/minor exaggeration/utter bullshit (delete as applicable) the sales team have spun. Whether their conscience gets involved before the deal closes, different question.
Not at my work. Around here sales engineers just say "this is a proof of concept, X will be different in the final version". Then, after they close the deal, they give us their half implemented feature they developed that none of us heard about before, and tell ys that we need to finish it and include it in the next release.
He may have made a good living, but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt.
That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
Yeah, and the business people could not care less. I am on a team taking in millions of dollars from a Delphi Windows app from 1997. Zero tests, horribly mangled business logic embedded in UI handlers. Maintaining that app is not feasible. I'm rebuilding a modern version of it only because it is embarrassing to demo and is such a UX nightmare that our distributor made us commit to a new app.
