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(Business theme here. Because I kind of want more business content on the Motte.)
I was wrong about Sales.
Beginning of my career, I was an engineer thinker, but who could Talk To Girls (TM), so I was sent out to talk to clients for technical sales reasons. Back then, I hated it because I was still trying to integrate the Autism firmware into my brain. Everything was logical, right? Cost-benefit analysis. Couldn't these stupid "customers" just see that our product provided value and pay us?
That's not how business works because that's not how humans work. Humans are not efficiency seeking automatons. We have problems, we want solutions. If we can't see how a thing helps us solve a problem, then that thing has a value of zero. Sales is the process of understanding problems deeply and then matching those problems (or not!) with a solution. It is applied empathy. It is one of the best skills to develop (so long as it is developed with integrity). If every Sales bro suddenly spent a year as therapists, we'd cure all this millennial mental health nonsense right away.
The fact is that deep engineer types who try to engineer products or services without caring about human interaction are truly trying to dehumanize humans. I get the same bad vibes from Sam Altman and Elon Musk because I truly believe both of them privately think, "Man, this would all be so much easier if like 90% of people just died." Technical elegance, engineering genius, physics-defying new invention don't. actually. matter if they fail to help people. I think the one hack here are the Theoretical Physicts who might actually be discovering capital-T Truth with math. But I'm too dumb to actually validate that.
But but but but ... Used car salesmen! Pushy boiler room stock brokers! The whole pharmaceutical industry! Can't sales be used for horrible awful very no-good reasons? Yes, but not try at scale for a long time unless there's tacit approval from lots of other humans. In all of the examples I provided, what's really going on is people want to defy reality in one way or another. They're being greedy. They don't want to live healthy they want to not feel pain. They want something they can't afford because they want to feel like they have certain status. Sales people playing into the self-deception of others isn't some black magic - it's psychological failure and manipulation that goes on constantly all over the world. Calling sales bad or evil is the same logical fallacy as calling human beings inherently bad or evil.
Can you tell I do a lot more sales and sales like things now? It's infinitely more satisfying that being a smarter than everyone else engineer. I'm not going to pretend like the software I've been involved with cured cancer, but, in many cases, I did see get applied to solve meaningful business problems. I like to think it contributed to economic growth in a small way.
If you want to be "part of a great effort to promote human flourishing" ... learn sales.
I've seen some very good salesmen whom live purely off commission, and some very bad salesmen that I have to come in and correct their lies after the fact, or watch them fumble something horribly where I unintentionally gave them a potential deal on a silver platter.
I confess to not being very impressed with the majority of salesmen.
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Sales is ultimately about being the single point of contact to yell or be yelled at when things go wrong. The human capability to know the one person who can unfuck a fuckup asap engenders more goodwill and long term value than any optimized automated sales chain. As more processes get commoditized and systemized, it means the edge case failures narrow to even more complex interlinks, and thats where a good sales person would understand a clients specific needs and highlight issues in advance or understand the client and the product well enough to propose solutions rapidly.
Having said that, the negative reputation of salesmen exists for a reason. Relying on personal affective tricks to convince cajole or coerce cooperation in information asymmetric instances is definitely bad. The only way to keep sales agents on their toes is to ensure continuity of engagement (not further sales) because you can pin them down and yell at them if things fuckup. If the salesman can and does run away after selling you something, you gotta expect something fucky is up.
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This is the thing that people who complain about Adobe's effective monopoly on creative software don't understand. Ignore the fact that most Adobe products have advanced features that the competition can't keep up with; it's not important. What is important is that, for all its complexity, Photoshop is easy to use for someone who has never used it before. The basic functions are intuitive. And if you learn how to do something more advanced, the program is structured in a way that you also learn the underlying logic behind how it's set up so that the next time you try to do something similar it will be easy to understand what you're doing.
Then look at an atrocity like Gimp. It's ugly, the basic stuff is intuitive enough but try to do anything beyond that and it's like pulling teeth. It owes its existence to an army of volunteers whose lone motivation is that they think software should be free. And that's pretty much where it ends; as long as they can make a product that looks enough like Photoshop to fool people who don't actually use Photoshop for anything serious, they'll always have an army of Linux fanboys who will whinge about Microsoft's OS dominance and point to Gimp as a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if you dare point out its shortcomings (which indeed are many), then you'll get scolded for not understanding that they don't have Adobe money and who cares what it looks like as long as it works and if it doesn't work then did you really need that feature enough to pay $10/month for it?
What they don't understand is that Adobe doesn't make its money on selling software to people who use it to make internet memes. Its customer base is people who actually use it for a living, and have to stare at the thing all day and don't have the time to deal with a janky workflow. I'm not even one of those people but even as a hobbyist I don't want to spend my leisure time dealing with the frustrations of crappy software. If you want your product to gain market share you have to give people a reason to use it, and "It's free" isn't a reason for people to use it if they're using it for business purposes — the up-front cost might be zero, but that doesn't account for the additional time spent using it and the loss in quality. Doing nothing is also technically free.
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I should probably switch companies because at my company our sales isn't so much problem-solving as it is about warm and fuzzy vibes.
Virtually every feature I've ever worked on seems to have no users whenever I query prod. I assume the same goes for nearly all features in our Frankenstein's monster of a monolith. Instead, 99% of the product's value comes from this miniscule percent of product loops and workflows written by some senior architect 20 years ago.
Still, we're told all our features are very important to sales. You see, I don't work for a software company like I think I do -- I work for a sales company. The defects I fix weren't caught by users, but by internal sales engineers. The purpose of these bells and whistles is to give the client warm and fuzzy feelings that our product is better than the competition. Naturally these features don't solve user problems because they go unused! And the shot-calling higher ups who sign the contracts and see the demos aren't actually our users -- they are our users' boss's boss.
Still, it would be wrong to say we demo vaporware (it does work, although probably not as robust), or to say the features don't provide company value. They win deals (presumably). But our software engineers are jaded because we're usually not solving user problems.
Request bloat and cowardly/uncaring dev teams are usually to blame for useless features going nowhere. I've had to deal with a product that literally no one thinks is useful at all, but the request was built into production because no one cared enough to disabuse the boss of his false assumptions. 'Lets try and see how it works' turns into 'wait why is this even here' when it is caught four months later.
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Seems to me more that sales types who complain about the way engineer types think or do their job are truly trying to dehumanize engineers.
Complaining about how other people think is dehumanizing?
Welcome to the Motte!
Can you offer more here than a basic "nuh-uh, YOU'RE stupid!" as a response? I'm willing to hear rebuttals to my evaluation of Sales style thinking, but I don't see much content in your reply.
The idea that the touchy-feely-schmoozy-douchey sort of interaction that salespeople are pros at is the be-all and end-all of human interaction and that what engineers engage in is not is "dehumanizing" the engineers.
Can you just ... try harder? There's no content here. Again, I'm all ears for a meaningful counterpoint, rebuttal, whatever. There are at least two or three already in this thread. Right now, you're saying "nah, salesmen suck" and leaving it at that.
Everything about your original post oozes contempt for engineers, from "autism" to "could Talk To Girls (TM)". But what I'm specifically complaining about is that you are claiming the way engineers work is not the way humans work. That places engineers themselves outside the bounds of humanity. It's a damn common thing, probably because sales and marketing people push it all the time, and they've gotten a lot of engineer types to accept it, but it's still bullshit.
Why? Why is it bullshit?
My post didn't say that the way engineers work is not the way humans work. My post said that engineers approach problems, solve them - often very well - and then fail to appreciate that solving the engineering problem alone is insufficient because what business is about is solving human problems.
Engineering, across all of its various domains, is a fantastically valuable endeavor for humans to pursue. On its own, it is not enough. And that's fine. We work, as humans, in complex organizations so we can leverage one another's relative strengths to achieve a larger goal.
Because you said;
I'll respond by saying that everything about your multiple posts oozes butthurt engineer who think that sales and marketing add no value. As a former engineer who felt this way for a long time, I have a strong prior that you're failing to understand some very human problems. You can change this and your life can improve.
The number one complaint engineers have about sales types is the sales people make deals by promising the customer things they expect engineering to back up. They then talk management into making it engineering's problem that the thing can't be done or is more expensive than the deal is worth. You can call that "butthurt" but it's certainly not dehumanizing.
Engineers communicate with each other. This mode of communication is not the same as salespeople use with each other or their buyer counterparts at the clients. Salespeople, including you, consider only the latter to be "human interaction". That's what's dehumanizing.
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