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by mrweasel 536 days ago
We had a sales guy that the rest of the office hated, but whom I absolutely loved. He'd sell the craziest shit. E.g. him and I attempted to replace a customers Kubernetes stack with Azure websites and CosmosDB, saving them two years of hosting the first month (We failed because the client didn't feel like we where being serious).

At one point he sold a project that would lead to his termination and it was the most brilliant sale I've ever seen. A customer wanted monitoring and a 24/7 "operation center", but one which didn't have access to any systems. We'd channel alerts from the customer into our on-call, which would then phone the customers staff and tell them that "YO! X is broken" and hang up. The price was insane, is was free money, but the customer was excited and felt like they got a great deal.
1 comments
DavidPeiffer 536 days ago
What lead to his termination? Was the on-call team not thrilled with having to (even minimally) deal with issues from the systems of another company?
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mrweasel 536 days ago
That was a major part of it. I never completely understood why, but for some reason the majority of the staff really hated that project. I though it was a brilliant move. The problem may have been that people attempted to over-engineer the project and handle scenarios that wasn't in scope, setting unrealistic goal resulting in a lot of pretty dumb and boring work.

Another part was that was yet another service which we technically didn't offer, which he sold. He was always very upfront about the fact that he knew that a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do. That pissed of a lot of people, but in hindsight, five years later: He sold the right things and we should embraced those sales/potential sale, because the local market has moved in the direction he was going.

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kayodelycaon 536 days ago
> a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do

This may not be the situation but I’m willing to bet he created an insane amount of chaos for everyone else by doing this. Existing projects constantly getting delayed or cancelled because he sold something that wasn’t planned for.

At my last job, we had a department who delegated all of their quarterly goals to the development team. They made us responsible for accomplishing their goals on top of everything else we were doing.

They delayed critical projects for years for marginal gains.

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