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Comment by xtrapolate | Hacker News Reader

As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"?

Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!

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>As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"?

That's fair.

I've wondered about that myself. Will I just end up resenting "the customer" the same way I resented "the committee?"

My hope is no because I feel like with a customer, I can learn more from failures. If I launch a product and it doesn't sell, I can try a totally new product or adjust it somehow and see how that affects things. I can talk to customers and get their feedback. With the promo committee it felt very opaque and my opportunities for feedback were so rare. Plus I felt like if I got better, I'm just getting better at working the perf system which is probably only useful within Google or other Google-like companies. If I get better at selling to customers, that should be useful in a much broader way.

>Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!

Thanks for reading!

I prefer pitching to customers because they really do get more value out of your product if you better communicate what it does and how it helps them. With committees it sounds more like playing a zero-sum game.

I would argue it's different, because customers are harsh but rational, while promotion committees are more capricious than harsh.

Customers have "skin in the game". They spend their own money, not somebody else's, and they presumably use what they bought.

Promotion committees have little skin in the game. They meet for an hour and make decisions, and they don't see any consequences of those decisions. They're following rules they didn't make that are supposed to lead to a good result, but they may not in practice.

If the results are bad, they don't really get any feedback until years later. Maybe this blog post will be taken as feedback. Unfortunately this story sounds pretty familiar to me (having worked at Google).

> As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"?

Talking to a customer is (usually) a human process involving an actual conversation. Back-and-forth, incremental, and to the point about business needs of the customer and how you can satisfy them. As a sibling comment said, they have 'skin in the game', they're there to get shit sorted out, they need that shit sorted out and you're there explicitly to help them do it.

Pitching to a promo committee is filling out a form (including fantastic questions like "what's one thing you're good at") where you have no feedback on what the other side is thinking until they tell you 'yay' or 'nay' a month later. Good luck again in half a year. Oh, and those committees will give your packet just a couple of minutes because there's a few hundred of them that they need to handle. Hopefully your packet doesn't get reviewed right before lunch when they're cranky.

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