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by anigbrowl 1372 days ago
Many people in tech has had a bad experience (or sometimes several) with sales people who make commitments to a client to close a deal, and then come back to the office and tell the tech people what they need to deliver. Finding oneself having to bridge the gap between reality and what the client imagined they were going to get is an acutely unpleasant experience. Recall too that many people work with computers because they don't particularly enjoy working with people. Of course, it's equally true that good sales people take that social burden off engineers and act as bridge builders with clients rather than selling used cars.

On a more general level:

> I've earned a 7 figure income for 10+ years > a 80-100 hours a week sales machine

Maybe just chill out a bit? A lot of people don't want to work 4-5000 hours a year, and if their utility function doesn't match yours then they're just going to find you stressful to be around. By most people's standards you've already Made It economically speaking, yet you sound anxious as hell about everything falling apart.

1 comments

Respectfully, the experience you outline above is a routine example of sales hackery. Does it not ideally underscore precisely why startups/tech orgs strategically error in their woeful sales hiring protocols?
Your question was about why many hackers stereotypically don't like sales people. I gave you the information you were asking for. If you want validation, I charge $500/hour.
Out of curiosity, what's your specialization?
If you were asking me, nowadays it's network analysis/visualization. But I am very much a solo hacker and not product oriented, sometimes to an unwise degree.

I don't hate sales people and think they provide a valuable service many engineers would rather not have to deal with; but the hyper-competitiveness of many sales folk optimizes for a zero-sum scarcity paradigm that is often in tension with what motivates engineering types.

Design and implementation of outbound prospecting campaigns for SMB's. Side note Marco---Italy is amazing, what are you working on?
Cool. Currently co-founder and CTO of a startup in the AR/VR space.