In the places I've worked, sales engineers are similar to consultants. They work with the sales team to produce a demo for a prospective customer. They need to have development chops to do any customizations, produce realistic sample data, and need to understand the architecture of the product to make a compelling demo. They also need to have the social skills to answer technical questions on-the-fly.
Yeah where I work they have no idea about development. What they do is more like write in the chat saying stuff like "I have a 100% guaranteed sale to the biggest customer ever (which is usually bs), now implement this incredibly complicated feature within this week!"
Actually our sales INCREASED when they fired like 100 of these guys :D
