[a4isms]

> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed.

I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up to me and gave me some feedback that none of the business-types had articulated:

Products are either vitamins or painkillers. People buy painkillers, because they're in pain. People postpone vitamins, because nothing is wrong and the benefits are always "later."

I didn't 100% change what I chose to build over the years, but from that time to today, I have worked on always spinning what I sell as an antidote to a customer's pain point, rather than as an investment they make to pay off eventually.

p.s. I don't know where that dev got the "vitamin/painkiller" metaphor, but it's sticky!

[dathinab]

Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It's normal to take pain killers.

It should not be.

It should be a last resort.

You should take what fixes the problem and give your body time to heal not take pain killers and pretend nothing is wrong.

Pain killers are addicting, can have an increasingly reduced effect, can have a bunch of side effects and can make the end result much worse by not healing wounds (metaphorically) when they are still easy to heal(1).

(1): Through sometimes they can also help you healing by preventing you from doing pain-caused bad actions, like setting down your food in a bad angle.

EDIT: Just to be clear I mean pain killers for a "normal live" situation, not in context of you lying in a hospital bed or having extrema healthy issue which can't be fixed/heal anytime shortly.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

It’s important to draw a distinction between narcotic painkillers like opioids and safe painkillers like anti-inflammatories. In general, it’s safe for people to occasionally take certain painkillers for minor pain. In some populations, drugs like aspirin can even extend life when taken daily.

[nemothekid]

>Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It's normal to take pain killers.

I've heard this metaphor before, by a VC, and it was medicine vs vitamins.

[StillBored]

Chuckle. I wonder about the "leopards ate my face" moment which seems particularly apt here if you consider Si valley VC money to largely be expensive steroids that appear to provide big growth fast, but will likely land you in worse shape long run either when you withdraw them, or by leaving you addicted trying to avoid the resulting crash.

AKA your removing the "vitamins" path in exchange for some future "medicine"

[treeman79]

A real fun one is rebound headaches. Spent a few months with horrifically painful headaches. Turned out it mostly from painkillers. More I took. Worse headaches Got.

My other less painful headaches that started the cycle were an actual brain issue. Just took a few years to get correct diagnosis.

Eventually had a cycle of one round of pain killers every other day. Cycling through To a different kind each time. This mostly worked until I got excess brain fluid drained off. Which actually solved issue.

[Obscurity4340]

What was the ultimate underlying pathology?

[treeman79]

High cranial pressure (IIH) and lots of minor strokes.

Apparently I’m genetically prone to clots. (Factor 5)

[fanick]

Damn, I think I might have similar issues. Also diagnosed with Leiden. Should I be worried?

[treeman79]

So you have any symptoms of TIAs?

I had symptom of one every 6 months or so since high school. Got exposed to some chemicals and it went to a couple per week.

Blood thinners keep it under control.

[KptMarchewa]

My head hurts because atmospheric pressure changes fast. If you solve this problem I'll stop taking painkillers, and in the meantime you could stop using appeal to nature fallacies.

[fleddr]

It's accounting bias/culture.

Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?

[midoridensha]

>Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

>According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors.

Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting the developers any monitors at all.

[jlokier]

You joke, but my current job sent me a Dell laptop with a tiny screen and a fancy 4-video port USB-C dock. Seem I'm expected to have my own monitors.

(Turns out I do have my own monitors, but they are for my own laptop, and are HDMI and Thunderbolt which the dock isn't, except one HDMI.)

[Eisenstein]

If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist, and when you start to quantify it, the numbers turn into targets that must continually improve.

[fleddr]

Yep, and I think we can apply the accounting logic to the original article.

A team that regularly saves costs for other business units is a promise of cost savings. Dropping the entire time is an immediate and factual cost saving.

Short-sighted? Yes.

[zemvpferreira]

It's a trope with some truth to it, but it runs out of steam fairly quickly. Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram? $1000 iPhone? Liver King?

I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then, desire can win over pain many times.

Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.

[matkoniecz]

> Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram?

I would say that it was closer to a tasty pizza.

It was definitely not fitting either "vitamin" (worth investing for future payoff) or painkiller (solving immediate and urgent need[1])

[1] I guess that hiding/temporary fix is not intended to be part of this allegory

[fxtentacle]

At my university, Facebook was the painkiller for involuntary celibacy ;)

[astrange]

Lots of people run businesses out of their Instagram accounts. Might not be what it was for, but those followers can be valuable.

[a4isms]

It doesn't run out of steam so much as it fits a particular scope better than others. We can bend over backwards to make it fit other scopes, like another commenter points out: FOMO is a headache, and social media could be called the aspirin.

I personally find that metaphors work best as mnemonics. Unless you're in health sciences, products are neither vitamins, nor painkillers. If this metaphor helps us remember to distinguish products that solve urgent and existing problems from products that are investments providing an ROI over time... Good enough for me.

Now about fear and greed. I agree with you. In fact, I do so because when I was in sales and marketing, I read a book that said that the four motivations that mattered were fear, greed, exclusivity, and belonging. The first two are literally what you just mentioned.

That particular simplification doesn't fit every situation any more than Maslow's Hierarchy does, but it's another surprisingly useful lens to use when looking at value propositions.

At the end of the day, all these rules of thumbs and metaphors are tools, if you find one that's useful, add it to your toolbox and figure out when it works and when it doesn't. The more of these you have, the more ways you have of analyzing a situation and coming up with a rough model for how it works.

So I agree with you: Fear and greed are the big sellers in B2B.

[OkayPhysicist]

The original facebook was a painkiller the same way the Oxycodone you crush up on a table and insuffulate is a painkiller. The metaphor works amusingly well, actually.

[beambot]

Youthful hormones and social belonging are pains too... Consumer pains are often more abstract.

[mjevans]

iPhone was / is a 'status symbol' and 'fashion accessory', which happened to be way better than the clunky, expensive, and poor UI mobile phones which came before, (aside from Blackberry, which was a corp status symbol, work / gov focused, not average consumer.)

[astrange]

What actually happens with vitamins is people love taking them (because they’re colorful and some of them are food preservatives) but there’s like no evidence they have health benefits.

[rurp]

I don't know, I was surprised to learn that my vitamin D was quite low, and I get a fair amount of sunlight each week, probably more than a lot of office workers.

Now that I take supplements though my levels have been fine. From what I have read, quite a few people fall into a similar bucket.

[mirker]

Do you feel different? There is a theory that vitamin D is merely correlated with a healthy body. Sunlight may be required.

[rurp]

Honestly no, but I believe there is some research showing potential long term health benefits of avoiding low vitamin D. It's totally possible I'm wasting my money, but I'm happy with the potential benefit/cost ratio. I would gladly pay the price of some vitamins for even a small chance of avoiding significant health problems.

[mannykannot]

...unless you actually have a deficiency.

[TomSwirly]

The people in the United States who can afford to buy and consume vitamins are almost certainly not people with a deficiency.

[TremendousJudge]

Most people in the US are vitamin D deficient, it's very cheap, yet it's rare for people to take supplements.

[astrange]

Yes, D+K is the best one to take. D only can lead to heart issues (atherosclerosis), and multivitamins don't really have enough to help here.

It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.

[opo]

>It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.

Not that I expect HN readers to likely end up in a situation where they have to decide whether to eat a polar bear liver, but that is definitely a part of the polar bear that no one should eat:

>...A polar bear’s liver contains an extremely high concentration of vitamin A. This is due to their vitamin A rich diet of fish and seals. The Eskimos have long been wary of eating the polar bear for this reason, but it’s something the early Artic explorers found out the hard way. Ingesting the liver can cause vitamin A poisoning known as acute hypervitaminosis A. This results in vomiting, hair loss, bone damage and even death. So although actually capturing a polar bear may seem life threatening, it turns out that eating its liver is just as deadly.

https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/10/04...

[layer8]

Technically though, vitamin D is not a vitamin. ;)

[mannykannot]

I happen to be one who does, and no, it's not a consequence of a bad diet or unhealthy lifestyle.