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by evanjrowley 252 days ago
Years ago, when my vantage point was support and consulting, I had the same view of sales and marketing. I encountered too many buyers who did not know what they were buying, too many sellers who did not know what they were selling, and me in the middle having to reset everyone's expectations. The authority held by sales and marketing to steer the product into insane directions seemed like an injustice. It's an unfortunate reality that customers who already paid for something are often de-prioritized for new customers with different requirements and less expertise.

Much of my job is now customer onboarding, so I work closer with sales and solution architects. I also fill in for the solution architects when they're spread too thin for the events marketing has set up. The struggles faced by those teams are entirely different than those on the engineering and support side, and while it might not seem fair, a good corporate culture means everyone is motivated to work hard. Many of those roles are based on comission, so their financial and career prospects are worse than ours when they're not fully dedicated and producing results.

In terms of who gets what computer, it's unfortunate that the majority of users will be people who have average (or less than average) technical skills. That means a lot of them are afraid to even try macOS and will want to go back to PCs as soon as some trivial difference gives them the slightest uncertanty. Personally, I'd love to work on a rice'd hyprland system all day, but the fact that the business relies on BS like MS/Google collaboration software, our CRM has no keyboard shortcuts, etc. means technical users will always be held back.

1 comments

I also work in consulting as a staff consultant for a third party cloud consulting company. I’m in “delivery”. A statement of work doesn’t go to the client until it has been approved by someone high up (like me) from the delivery side.
Honestly that's a great control to provent client engagements from going off the rails. I hope more organizations adopt that.