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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this is an issue for the current employees. Surely you hire a bunch of sales people and a bunch of consultants to help with on-boarding/support and place them in a separate floor or building. They don't really need to interact with developers.

The 'brogrammers' just carry on as normal and some of their work is now adding features to help support enterprise requirements. Unless your sitting a cold calling sales rep next to my desk then who cares? Someone has to pay for that foosball table and fridge full of beers, let the sales people on a different floor do their job.

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Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compressed timeline because "this is a deal we can't afford to lose." Repeatedly. No idea if that's happeing at GitHub, but I've seen it happen a few other places, and it sucks for the engineering and product teams even if the sales people are in a different state.

In a similar vein, enterprise customers tend to want different things than smaller customers do. This means that the features the teams have to work on will change, and some people may not be as interested in working on stuff they have no interest in using themselves.

> sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do

Maybe this is a trope from the 90s and 2000s or from a Scott Adams cartoon, but I disagree this is representative of most enterprise sales these days. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but every company I've worked at the past decade has had a knowledgeable sales force. I've been asked plenty of times, "can you add this feature for a huge customer?" and been able to say "no, that is not realistic for us to complete in a reasonable amount of time."

You are indeed lucky. I would guess the companies you worked at were profitable?

I think that overselling is a trait of young companies, really.

Every sale matters when you don't have customers, and if it means a little back-breaking work to get that first bit of revenue, I know very few companies with the fortitude to say 'No'.

Once the product has established a foothold, reputation, or repeatable sales process that works, product managers get an idea of exactly what it is that customers want, and across more than one data point. From that, they're able to communicate the exact value they provide to the sales team, and that sales team is able to approach customers with an actual, legitimate, proven value proposition.

It isn't until the product team really knows what they have that those requests become easier to turn down.

(Or at least, that's been my experience.)

I've never worked for a company with a sales organization that had a blatant disregard for what we could do, but everywhere I've ever worked there was usually a promise of something that we couldn't quite do out of the box, or a level of speed that wasn't normal. A perfect example would be integration to SSO systems like PingFederate or Tivoli, et al. Maybe the prospective customer needed a certain type of report that wasn't already built in. In the early days it was supporting a different application server than we'd typically been deploying to.

They weren't promising Ferarris when we were building Maseratis, but they were definitely throwing in the undercoating and floor mats. Even now when I'm building and selling my own software products I do it. I literally do it to myself. In the end it helps evolve the product if you make a responsible claim you can get to.

It's gotten better since the 90s. There are more people in sales with some dev background and therefore at least a bit of a clue.

I've seen it happen within the last 12 months.

Sales people don't make this happen, management makes this happen. An org within a company only has as much power as management gives it.

No, do not wave away Sales' culpability in this. Those in Sales are adults, who are fully capable of taking responsibility for their actions.

Their responsibility is to bring in income.

It follows that sales teams should rob banks.

Your point?

Yes, and sales are put under pressure by management to make numbers come hell or high water.

> Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compressed timeline because "this is a deal we can't afford to lose."

A million times this. I currently work at an enterprise software firm, and this is exactly what happens with each new client.

In addition to the compressed timelines and ridiculous feature requests that must be honored... in terms of the product itself, you have to do one of the following: 1) Maintain separate codebases for each client, or 2) Build the application so it can handle different features for each client, since each client will want different things.

Neither course of action is nearly as pleasant as having products that are the same for all customers.

3.) The ball of spaghetti rolls downhill, agglobulating ALL THE FEATURES, along with forty-seven hundred switches and configuration options controlling them, resulting in a combinatorial explosion of possible system states and code paths, and you end up with something that sends email, has a social feed, group chat rooms, a home-brew scripting language, some half-baked custom charting and reporting, theming and customization options, and no idea what in the hell you originally set out to build. Oh, and dashboards. People love dashboards for some reason.

I think you just summed up why no one's been able to kill off craigslist. CL kept it simple, stuck to what they did best and hardly added any features.

And restricted access to their data + cease-and-desisted anyone who wanted to augment the CL experience. They're still in business because they are shrewd and have the critical mass required to maintain their monopoly, not because they have a killer product.

I find it hard to find fault anyone who resists 3rd parties attempting to Embrace and Extend ("augment") their product. It is pretty obvious to me that getting disintermediated from your users lowers the value you offer & makes you a disposable part of the stack: as soon as the 'augmenters' become popular enough, they'd replace CL with a home-grown solution

I'm impressed, it's almost an exact description of the product in my company, only thing we don't have (yet) is group chat rooms. And yes it's pretty horrible experience developer wise.

Or, alternatively, "I know we have our product, but these guys don't want it. Instead they want this [custom engineering project] that's tangentially related to our core product. They are offering to pay lots of money for us to ignore our main product and add [cancerous project] to it, at which point we can surely sell it to tons more customers!!

CEO: "$$$!!!"

B.D.: "Pivot!"

Engineers: "There goes our sprint"

Product Managers: "I'll be updating my resume..."

I actually lol'd reading this because it's true.

As someone who used to sit between the engineering and sales teams from the engineering side, I actually empathize with the sales teams more than most engineers. You aren't there to write code in a vacuum. There are a lot of time it IS a deal you can't afford to lose.

I'd much rather lose my job because we couldn't meet crazy sales expectations, than lose it cause our tech was great & no one wanted it.

Really? Either way you lose your job, but one way you built a great product that couldn't get noticed, while the other way you are considered to have failed at building the product.

A product that no ones wants is not a great product. Great software != great product.

You seem to be tying marketing into the definition of a product, as if a product cannot be great unless it's well-known. This makes no sense. A product can be great and still be obscure relative to competitors, even inferior ones. cf. Windows vs. Linux, IE vs. Firefox during the browser wars, etc.

It's the same old story: OS/2 was superior to DOS, Netscape was better than IE, Dreamcast was amazing, Amiga was ahead of its time, etc.

It's not just software. Shakespeare wasn't a popular playwright in his time, but now he's considered an icon. Were his plays therefore not great because, at the time they were written, no one wanted them?

Many good things are not popular or well-known. They are no less good.

> Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality

In my experience, this happens because sales people come to the engineers and say "can we do [mad thing]?" and, engineers being engineers, go "yeah, sure, [possibly adding detail and constraints but the sales people stopped listening at 'yeah']". I've seen this many, many times.

Default answer out of any engineer's mouth should be "No." with optional coda of "But if you can tell me more about it, we might get to maybe."

> some people may not be as interested in working on stuff they have no interest in using themselves.

Good thing this isn't some voluntary project but a massively funded commercial company. Since when must employees love every little thing they're doing?

This kind of BS culture is what runs companies into the ground the moment they need to actually build something that isn't "fun".

Why did you use the word 'brogrammers' instead of programmers?

Because of GitHub's cultural issues towards women and sexism. I.e. the whole Julie Ann Horvath/Tom Preston-Werner/Zach Holman incident.

0 of those people are now at GitHub.

Why do the sales people need to be on a different floor?

the smell

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