Paul,
Good essay. I apologize for seeming nitpicky, but worry you may be encouraging misunderstanding about the type of person who succeeds at sales inside a large company:
<blockquote>The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. </blockquote>
Sales people actually do build things. The things they build are called client relationships. Each one is new and different in some way. Once the relationship is created, upselling is pretty easy to do, as are yearly renewals. Often, these renewals are sent over to the account management team and taken out of the hands of sales.
There's actually quite a bit of strategy involved in creating these relationships, especially for a complex sale -- complex in terms of the organizational structure of the customer and the technology of the product. There's an awful lot of time spent thinking about what questions to ask different people in the organization and when in order to find their specific problems and elicit the specific needs. Only after you know what you need to know about the organization and the people in it do you pitch. A lot of these problems and needs are similar, but the pitch has to be tailored to what they have told you. This is how you show the customer respect, and build trust. A lot of it is subconscious but a lot of it is learned behavior.
Furthermore, sales at a large company can be quite entrepreneurial. You either make your numbers or you don't. If you don't, you get fired. If you exceed them by a large enough margin, you get to skip sales meetings and show up whenever you feel like it.
This is the first time I've commented on one of your essays, but I've bought about 5 copies of your collection for friends.