Why most engineers cannot sell stuff
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Windows gaining the required features, improving on the most used ones. Snarky question: Did you turn off feature usage reporting yelling "Don't you dare spying on me, Mickey$oft!!!" ?
Peter Adam wrote:
improving on the most used ones.
Exactly... the icons :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Peter Adam wrote:
improving on the most used ones.
Exactly... the icons :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
Don't forget the acrylic effects! Have you turned off spying?
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"Bless sales, they have no brains but the gift of gab..." Well, after some 20+ years in the field I'm pretty much convinced that most (better) sales are savvy people, at least in managing their own lives. They don't have a very complex job, they mostly get rewarded very well for selling some stuff, better than the ones building that stuff in the first place, even if the sales person might not even know the tiniest thing about the product they're selling (sometimes). They can go out and have dinners with people, play some tennis, visit parties,... and it's all part of working hours, since you're relationship-building. They grow a really nice (social) network which makes them more and more valuable for future projects/employers, which is the counterpart of the engineer that needs to keep on top of new technologies, investing lots of personal time, just to stay relevant. Sales get the nicer cars, the better paychecks, the nicer office desk (and office chicks :) ), most of the kudos when a project is delivered successfully... Have seen this happening like ALL of the times in my previous jobs. Who is the smarter guy? Me working and learning like crazy, conceiving from scratch the products that companies are selling, for a decent income, but not one that'll ever make me wealthy, or the sales guy, living a pretty relaxed and social life, getting a nice base salary, generous commission and gains 'expertise and relevancy' without consciously investing time or effort in it? I actually knew a sales guy which was very good at selling (himself). So my boss hired the guy as the one who was going to generate lots of sales for our company. After two years, after first being promoted to sales manager (of 2 junior sales), he was let go. He didn't sell one(!!!) license of the product, nothing at all. But in those two years, he made more money than me and most of my fellow engineers would make in 10 years of hard work. I got to hear that two weeks after that he already found another victim where he exactly did the same thing. In the meantime he can add those former employers onto his CV, since he did work there, building a nice resume, making his profile even more appealing to other companies. And since they'll only know that he's full of shit after a year or two/three, he will have made some easy money, expanded his network and CV making it easier to reel in some even bigger fish, increasing his rate.
If you take away all sales people products would still move, just not at the rate as before. It would come down to the end user choices as to which product suits them best at the time. If you take away the engineer, everyone starves as there is nothing to sell and know way to make it.
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But ... a product - no matter how innovative and original - that is riddled with bugs gets remembered for the bugs, not the originality: when a competitor appears it's mentally compared against the buggy version, not the latest. Remember the Frontier: First Encounters[^] debacle? A "premium product" so riddled by bugs that PC Zone illustrated it's review with a turd tied up in a pretty bow: even making it shareware couldn't shift the bug-fixed version. It's a risk!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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We developed a product. It was really done in a bad way, by patching up resources from different teams. I did not like it at all. When I use it myself, I could see at least a dozen glaring issues. Just because we couldn't allocate resources into bug fixes, even the basic bugs were left alive. I had quoted an estimate of 2 weeks to give a final build (If someone's allocated for the bug fix) BUT The sales team tried the product in it's current state. Went straight to demo with the customer. Now they've sold it. Customers are signed up. They are using it, with all the bugs showing up randomly. And even the customer says they are happy And waiting for the next build. Strange. Totally different ideas. Now we are allocating resources to fix the bugs and make it good one. I'm known for perfecting till the last bolt is tightened. I guess I'm a bad seller. It's really a tough thought to sell a product with known bugs. I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been. :rolleyes:
Maybe the parts of the application that work are the ones that solve their problems and the buggy parts are of little use to them. Most software users have a limited set of work-related problems that they want the new program to solve. Once they start using it they will discover new "solutions" they never dreamed of.
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We developed a product. It was really done in a bad way, by patching up resources from different teams. I did not like it at all. When I use it myself, I could see at least a dozen glaring issues. Just because we couldn't allocate resources into bug fixes, even the basic bugs were left alive. I had quoted an estimate of 2 weeks to give a final build (If someone's allocated for the bug fix) BUT The sales team tried the product in it's current state. Went straight to demo with the customer. Now they've sold it. Customers are signed up. They are using it, with all the bugs showing up randomly. And even the customer says they are happy And waiting for the next build. Strange. Totally different ideas. Now we are allocating resources to fix the bugs and make it good one. I'm known for perfecting till the last bolt is tightened. I guess I'm a bad seller. It's really a tough thought to sell a product with known bugs. I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been. :rolleyes:
Nand32 wrote:
I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been
I see what you did there. Leaving out Nadella speaks volumes about the current state of Windows, and its never-ending stream of problematic patches that keep making the whole thing worse and worse...
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We developed a product. It was really done in a bad way, by patching up resources from different teams. I did not like it at all. When I use it myself, I could see at least a dozen glaring issues. Just because we couldn't allocate resources into bug fixes, even the basic bugs were left alive. I had quoted an estimate of 2 weeks to give a final build (If someone's allocated for the bug fix) BUT The sales team tried the product in it's current state. Went straight to demo with the customer. Now they've sold it. Customers are signed up. They are using it, with all the bugs showing up randomly. And even the customer says they are happy And waiting for the next build. Strange. Totally different ideas. Now we are allocating resources to fix the bugs and make it good one. I'm known for perfecting till the last bolt is tightened. I guess I'm a bad seller. It's really a tough thought to sell a product with known bugs. I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been. :rolleyes:
Strange, I'm kind of in the other boat. Been working on this new functionality for a couple months now. It's pretty solid, certainly enough for testing to get on it. But the product people keep making non-functional tweaks (wording, placement, etc). I'm saying, let's get this through testing and release it to the customers, then do iterations on those minor things later, rather than "we have to wait until everything is just so ." Because, of course, then some other person sticks there nose in, and we're making more tweaks, never getting to the actual release.
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Nand32 wrote:
I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been
I see what you did there. Leaving out Nadella speaks volumes about the current state of Windows, and its never-ending stream of problematic patches that keep making the whole thing worse and worse...
I see Nadella as merely a follower to the two biggies, who ruled the planet during those times. Nadella is more of a cloud guy, though he was part of early Windows-NT development team. I guess Azure has been doing reasonably well. So the courage to release stuff like Windows ME, The award goes to...The Gates & Ballmer. :-\
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Don't forget the acrylic effects! Have you turned off spying?
Not as much as I probably should
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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We developed a product. It was really done in a bad way, by patching up resources from different teams. I did not like it at all. When I use it myself, I could see at least a dozen glaring issues. Just because we couldn't allocate resources into bug fixes, even the basic bugs were left alive. I had quoted an estimate of 2 weeks to give a final build (If someone's allocated for the bug fix) BUT The sales team tried the product in it's current state. Went straight to demo with the customer. Now they've sold it. Customers are signed up. They are using it, with all the bugs showing up randomly. And even the customer says they are happy And waiting for the next build. Strange. Totally different ideas. Now we are allocating resources to fix the bugs and make it good one. I'm known for perfecting till the last bolt is tightened. I guess I'm a bad seller. It's really a tough thought to sell a product with known bugs. I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been. :rolleyes:
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I see Nadella as merely a follower to the two biggies, who ruled the planet during those times. Nadella is more of a cloud guy, though he was part of early Windows-NT development team. I guess Azure has been doing reasonably well. So the courage to release stuff like Windows ME, The award goes to...The Gates & Ballmer. :-\
Nadella's an engineer, but it's unfortunate he's all about Azure--but I can't blame him for that since it's doing extremely well. Ballmer was purely a salesguy, and look at what MS's stocks had been going during his decade (hint: nowhere). I just wish Nadella brought back to Windows the importance that Gates gave it. Nadella made it clear the platform is no longer important, and they'll go wherever their customers are (paraphrasing, but that's very much what he thinks). That's why we now have things like Office on Android.
