site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

This is a bizarre statement to make.

Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?

If you put a gun to my head, and told me to make the best argument I can think of in favor of that statement, I'd go with something like: A lot of companies are bloated. You could fire a good chunk of the workforce, and be none the worse for it, which would imply you are overpaying the people who remain hired, and underpaying those that would remain if you got rid of the bloat.

...but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean software engineers would be disproportionately spared from being fired...

What would sales for a small startup look like?

Lets assume Startup X in making enough money to sustain 10 engineers and 1 sales person. So the 10 engineers hire an MBA. What does the MBA do?

I'm asking this because the activity of sales is completely opaque to me. I can intellectually understand that for a company of sufficient size, that work needs to be offloaded to someone who only does that. But for a small company I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

As David Mamet so artfully put it in Glengarry Glen Ross, [They] get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

The core competency is being able to be told no a zillion times while your pay depends on getting a yes and still sounding confident on the next call.

As an actual salesperson in the tech space, I think a lot of the other comments are misguided. Gone are the days of salespeople doing easy fun shit with clients like golfing or going to the pub to drink. Nowadays salespeople have to challenge their customers, essentially change their beliefs about what they know/need in their business.

Look up the Challenger Sale, it explains the history of sales well.

The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions.

The idea is that sellers and buyers are in a perpetual arms race. Relationship building used to be the way to sell, and that's how it is now in the cultural consciousness. Unfortunately that idea is way behind the times. Excellent salespeople now have to be able to toe the line between pissing off a customer and convincing them that the salesperson is the authority, and knows better than they do, if they want to sell in a tough market or sell a lot.

For a very small company CEO and sales is often the same thing.

Otherwise it's not much different from a larger corporation except account management and front line sales will be the same person, and there won't be any support functions.

This is a point I keep coming back to, which is that many jobs without obvious arcane technical skills nonetheless require a skill, it just happens to be one which is hard to define.

Sales is a good example here. Sales people have to understand their clients, they have to understand how to take clients golfing or fishing or bring in a mobile barbecue trailer to their place of business, how to field client concerns- which necessarily entails being able to understand their product and then explain it in an 85 IQ way, because clients rarely have specific knowledge of your product- how to present as competent professionals representing their chosen field, and finally have to have good enough people skills to forge a meaningful connection with their client(this is usually but not always by discussing something completely unrelated to the product), move it into a discussion of the product, and then ask for the sale, all without the client noticing or feeling awkward. They also need to be able to get inside their client's head and figure out who to talk to.

All of this is a skill, it's a totally separate skill from engineering, and it's also a more or less full time job because sales guys need a lot of flexibility to respond to client needs which necessarily entails taking time out of doing some other job. All of these factors militate heavily against hiring an engineer to do sales.

All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.

There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.

The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).

I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.

I've heard it a few times, but only from a generalized "exploitation"/pro-labor PoV. I haven't seen any arguments that would apply to programmers but not assembly line workers (etc.), but maybe OP has.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

People on the internet say it often.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats