[PaulHoule]

Sales are maligned.

There is the guy at the car dealership who specializes in adding an extended service contract for your new car.

Then there's the guy who sells a software development project that lands a well qualified customer (joy to work with) and a good specification which was well estimated and price so you can complete the work profitably. Maybe you know nothing about formalwear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in.

[jjulius]

Sales are maligned for good reason. I'd wager I've experienced the "you know nothing about formal wear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in" salesperson a handful of times. Now, the number of times I've had someone try to sell me something while clearly not listening to what I have to say and getting uncomfortably pushy about it, well... yikes.

[danabrams]

Two types of sales philosophies: 1. It doesn't matter what you're selling, it's about the sales technique. 2. Develop deep domain and customer expertise.

The former is the scammy type, the latter is the type we love to work with.

But the same is true in any industry. Too many of us in technology are doing the technology equivalent of 1--becoming experts in C++ or React--instead of becoming deep domain and user experts.

[PaulHoule]

In software I like the person knows C++ or React in and out and I like the person who understands the domain, UX and such. I want both on the team.

I despise the guy who sells extended service contracts at the car dealership. I sure as hell don't want that guy selling software work because I won't be able to complete the work profitably and I'll be dealing with angry customers who don't trust me.

[s1artibartfast]

Engineers are awful too. The number of times I have been subjected to needlessly bad product designs far exceeds my negative interactions with sales people. And then there are the products that fail at their one function.

[notahacker]

Not to mention the type of telemarketing salespeople being ragged on here are the equivalent of "software engineers" in bottom bracket outsourcing companies whose principal skills are installing WordPress templates and making excuses...

[yoyohello13]

At least Engineers are trying to create something of value. Salespeople are just trying extract your value.

[s1artibartfast]

Positive sum exchange is value creation.

To take an extreme example: Selling a starving person a meal doesn't just extract the price value, but creates it too.

You might argue that there are better or more efficient was of creating that value, but the fact that it is created is inescapable.

If you want to make a utilitarian value argument against it, you need to compare it to a real world alternative subject to scrutiny that is just as harsh, not a perfect world one.

[underlipton]

Good salespeople are trying to connect customers with solutions that provide them value that they otherwise wouldn't have access to (generally because they weren't aware of it). Obviously, in practice, the line between that and the more negative experiences can be fuzzy and vary by one's perspective, but unless you have someone in-house who's dedicated to searching for new solutions... And then, they turn into a sort of salesperson themselves, with ambiguous allegiances. At least someone from the outside is someone you will always be skeptical about.

[recursive]

If no one was selling, all that engineering wouldn't be "of value".

[some_random]

Engineers can create things that don't have value and salespeople can create value by matching problems with solutions, there are a lot of things we all very happily pay for after all. It's just not that simple.

[sevensor]

Try working at a company that doesn’t know how to do sales, and you’ll learn to appreciate a good salesperson.

[fragmede]

What a bad, reductive point of view. While it's true there are shitty bad salespeople (as there are engineers), try selling anything without doing any selling of the product. Once the company gets to a certain size, having someone work on sales full time instead of getting an engineer who doesn't whan to do that work, work on that part time.

[JumpCrisscross]

Low-recurrence and low-value sales are almost entirely about exploiting information asymmetry. Most peoples’ sales experiences are almost entirely low value. (Low here meaning the client isn’t going to do independent diligence and doesn’t have the capacity and willingness to retaliate if screwed.)

[mrgoldenbrown]

The first type is vastly more common than the second. So I don't think it's unfair to malign sales in general. And if I'm buying a suit I need a skilled tailor to alter it to fit me, not someone to convince me to buy a suit - if I'm in the suit store I already know I want a suit and for what purpose.

[tanewishly]

> The first type is vastly more common than the second.

Depends- you might not even qualify non-type-1s as sales people. Especially the type that's trying to help you get what you need, and listen to you in the process.

[zhughes3]

How does someone become someone who sells the software development project? Is this an architect or sales engineer? I’m confused by how a sales engineer would gain the level of expertise needed to sell the project and specs/implementation.

Do they usually come from an IC developer role?

[fragmede]

While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better. It's also true that some sales people learn enough about coding to be dangerous and transition to sales engineering that way.

[fragmede]

While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better.

[bluGill]

Note that car dealerships are like that because the dealership cannot offer you the later. You go into the dealer having looked up their cost on Edmunds/kbb/... and are determined to give them zero profit from the sale. Worse you know (right or wrong) what you want to buy and so they can't even provide the service of listening to your needs and getting you in the right car.

In theory you should have better luck by walking in and saying I'll pay MSRP (thus giving them a reasonable profit) if you don't add all that other BS. In practice they won't know how to do that because nobody else does

[belthesar]

Having just went through the process of buying a car, and the amount of work, research and effort needed on my part to ensure that I didn't pay through the nose on a car, this is, in my opinion, squarely in response to the car sales industry almost universally adopting predatory sales tactics.

If I could go into a dealership and trust that everyone in the building wasn't out to get me, and instead wanted to build a longterm relationship with me from sales to service, advertised the actual cost of the vehicle instead of a BS pre-fees, pre-additional markup price, then I wouldn't do that. Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole story, but as I understand it the dealerships changed their behavior first, and the customer _had_ to get more savvy as a result.

You put enough customer predatory sales practices everywhere, and you raise a generation who just doesn't trust sales staff. It doesn't have to be this way though.

I gotta be careful though, I'm dangerously close to getting on my soapbox about how difficult it is to be a sustainable lifestyle business in today's day, and how much I wish a return to that.