When Your Engineers Start Doing Sales Or Get Fired, That’s The First Sign Your Business Is In Trouble

I came across a LinkedIn post this morning about this matter. This one start-up founder was updating his followers and community members about his current business move. In the post, he wrote about scaling down his backend team and converting the ones who stayed into sales. The plan now, it seems, is to double down the sales—bringing in some numbers for the company. 

Personally, I’ve seen this pattern before. No matter how he sugarcoated it by calling the move a “strategic shift” or “realignment for growth,” the real reason is pretty obvious. Disasters are about to happen. Sincerely speaking, this isn’t a strategy. It’s more like damage control to me. It is the result of the co-founders making sloppy decisions early on and hoping no one would notice the cracks forming beneath the surface.

The root of the issue almost always goes back to two things—a weak business strategy and a weak marketing strategy. When co-founders operate with the mindset of “speed matters” and build the business by using other people’s money, they obviously create a fragile company from day one. I’ve seen too many of the same things happen again and again. The story is always the same. The product was never stable, the quality sucks, there’s no proper roadmap, the market doesn’t need the product, and the proper marketing team isn’t in place. In short, the entire business foundation is just too weak. I believe the runaway for this company is now numbered.

It doesn’t help when the founders themselves don’t respect the backend. They see it as something that is not important and the first to be ditched when the situation gets tough. When growth plateaus or burn rate becomes scary, they look at the backend team not as the people who can fix the core problem but as overhead. That’s when the reshuffling starts. Engineers are either pushed into sales roles, laid off, or frozen out of strategy altogether.

What happens next is going to be interesting. More content, more exposure from everyone including the founders, more ad spend and more outreach. But the truth is painful. Nobody can sell crappy products. These decisions are, sadly, a short-term thinking. 

Top-notch companies don’t treat their backend team as a cost or as an afterthought. They treat them as an asset that protects the product, supports growth, and offers long-term leverage. These companies build depth before reach. They don’t see speed as something they need to prioritise. They build their marketing push in stages so that they don’t over-promise. They grow their business quietly, patiently, and intentionally—because they know momentum only matters if the product can handle it. Once these foundation layers are stabilised, then only the growth phase will come.

So when I see a startup bragging and boasting on social media too early about something that portrays them as “successful”, I already know how that story will end. To me, I’d rather build slow, grounded, and real than fast, flashy, and fragile.

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