Stanford CS major seeks sales/marketing monkey | Hacker News Reader

Stanford CS major seeks sales/marketing monkey

andrewchenblog.com

75 pointsdwynings16 comments

Can we stop saying monkeys? This attitude does not help.

A software business needs people with skills to make stuff as well as people with skills to sell that stuff. Neither is more important than other, nor can exist without the other.

If neither is more important, why do the business monkeys get paid significantly more than the programming monkeys?

"Important" is subjective. Compensation equals the intersection of supply and demand. There are fewer business monkeys than code monkeys, and demand is higher, so they make more. Teachers are more "important" than shortstops, but who are better compensated?

Nerds never seem to get this. If the MBAs are so worthless and overpaid, pick up the reigns and do it yourself... what's that? You say dealing with people is difficult? .......

I really doubt that there are fewer business monkeys than code monkeys. In 2008, 335,000 students graduated college with a degree in business, while only 40,000 graduated with a degree in computer science or a related field. An additional 70,000 studied other types of engineering, meaning there are about three business majors for every engineer.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/figures/fig_15.asp

You can't outsource and offshore sales.

Probably related to the lifestyles they are content with.

Negotiation skills.

Some businesses are run by engineers and are really successful because they solve difficult problems really well. They have sales/marketing people, but their main focus is in engineering. Google is a great example of such a company.

Other businesses are run by businessmen and are really successful because they can sell and market things that other people/businesses are willing to pay a lot of money for. They might have a few coders, but they focus on sales because their business is in exploiting the difference between the value some software brings and the cost it takes to produce the software. Oracle does this, and they're tremendously profitable, too.

Engineers make things. Salespeople get people to pay money for them. They're both necessary, but the importance of each really depends on the industry. It doesn't take a few thousand of the brightest minds in the world to make a mediocre database. And it doesn't take a giant marketing team to sell ad space through an auction.

But if you're going to change the world with new technology, you'll want a company run by engineers. If you're going to exploit a niche in corporate bureaucracy, you'll want lots of sales/business guys.

I agree with your comment (both are needed in a established corp) but I also agree with what the article was trying to say but ultimately doesn't succeed in driving home.

If the goal is to create a TECH STARTUP, the non-coding, "fear me. I am Wharton grad" MBA guy is the monkey (monkey == guy with commodity skills). Not the dev. And the whole irony is that a smart MBA would pick up on the fact that the tides have shifted in the current-day startup ecosystem and do something about it.

A smart biz guy has 2 choices. One is to adjusting the idea to be more "biz-centric", making their inherit skill more valued to the startup. The other is to expanding one's own job description of the biz dev beyond just coming up with the the idea with the goal of directly making the dev's life much easier (like do some front end coding/QA).

This article has valid points but unfortunately reads more like a "haha. Nerds Win!" jab.

Do you have any data to support your assertion, i.e, that companies with engineer CEOs are in aggregate more successful than those run by non-engineers? We can go back and forth anecdotally, but that doesn't mean much :-). You may very well be right, I'm just wondering.

That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying some businesses are more effectively run by engineers and others are more effectively run by MBAs. It depends on what the business is trying to do.

There are jerks in all walks of life. If you don't like your MBA, go find a better one. Treating people like monkeys is the problem, not the solution.

I think they're trying to be funny. It certainly does not come across as funny, however. So, if they really seek a sales and marketing person, they should avoid using loaded words like monkey, droid, etc.

See the satirical post about the terms rockstar and ninja, as it refers to employees. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180233

To be fair, I've hung out with some of the folks in the business school here at the UChicago, and there are some really bright and useful folks that I would be delighted to work with again. Participated in their new venture challenge thing with the bump folks and I found my teammates and many of the other folks there to be smart, motivated, and very skilled at necessary things that I never, ever want to become good at.

Never Work for a Stanford Student Again http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/col... seems relevant.

If I'm a code monkey, where's my banana?

What? I don't even get a banana?

Screw this, I'm going to be a Librarian.

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