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Comment by yaboy | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a startup that was acquired by an unsexy behemoth. It was not covered in TechCrunch. We had a sales guy who easily cleared over $1MM in salary and bonuses, several times the CEO and founders, because he went above and beyond, closing $15MM of new business a year.

When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally managed $2MM-$3MM books of business.

What do you think happened? He was slowly stripped of responsibilities and eventually forced out, for the crime of standing out as an exceptional performer.

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Stories like this make The Organization Man by W. H. Whyte[0] seem prescient. And never forget Pournelle's iron law:

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

[0] https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13785.html

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

You sound like someone who has read Systemantics/The Systems Bible by John Gall? If not, you are likely to enjoy it.

For anyone else reading, I enjoyed it tremendously and highly recommend it. It's a very fun book to read.

I know how that goes I guess. Slowly "rules" and "procedures" from the behemoth come into play. Before he knows it, his successful methods are "against the rules", and doors slowly close.

I love that dynamic /s

To play devil's advocate here: are any of those rules and procedures in place to prevent sales tactics that, while they might be successful, are also predatory?

We can write whatever story we want in between the details we were told... Maybe the salesman was secretly an FSB agent. Maybe he was an alien. Maybe he was Superman's alter-ego.

It's not really conducive to communication to fill in the blanks like that, even though any person in someone else's work story could be one of Them walking among us... ;)

Or maybe he employed more run-of-the-mill unsavoury techniques like low-level bribery (gifts, expensive wine-and-dine), plenty of shmoozing and the like. These techniques are not exactly useless in getting new business; however, most modern workplace rulebooks will consider them illegal/unethical.

You are joking right? It in the rulebook of most sales folks... everywhere. Companies have special budgets for this.

I don't mean some trading-only companies like Cargill who have extra prostitues budgets (at least 5 years ago that was true, and with expensive alcohol parties was the only way to do any business in places like Russia or most 3rd world countries). I mean any kind of bigger corporation. Banks have it. Any kind of finance business does. You won't get far without it.

There are obviously rules, but often they go the other way - employees shouldn't accept bribes in forms of these gifts. But getting clients, that's a free for all, the winner takes all (and biggest bonus).

Hmm my company's anti-corruption training material states very explicitly that the only gifts allowed are very minor ones (probably things like company-branded T-shirts or something) and dinners need to be on a modest budget, definitely no paid vacations and the like. Of course, this is just training material which I'm sure they make mandatory primarily to avoid liability, and I'm pretty far removed from the actual sales people in the company. It's entirely possible the training is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules, to paraphrase Hector Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean.

how are gifts corruption? It's a business and if you need to spend tons of money to close a high value deal, then that is what is required.

Not sure where you work, but they definitely don't. It's all part of the game. Just make the sale, that's what matters.

> expensive wine-and-dine

Just want to call out that the multi-million dollar salespeople I know wine and dine their spouses and friends far more lavishly than their clients. The people being sold to, similarly, aren’t alien to fine dining. For two people who enjoy that (versus a baseball game), it can be a genuine way to bond far from bribery. Gifts, on the other hand, yes.

No aliens required, just sales tactics that seem to be endemic in this industry.

Just about every week I comb through my inbox unsubscribing from all the companies' mailing lists that I most certainly did not subscribe to.

Sending those mails to the spam folder to reduce their reputation is a hobby of mine.

I don’t think it’s really relevant to the story, he was ethical but did schmooze prospects at dinners. Which is standard operating procedure for multi-million dollar database sales. The acquirer did the same.

He was incentivized to hustle harder, until incentives were stripped, out of spite.

"I have a master's degree and I went to <insert supposedly prestigious school here>, therefore no one's supposed to make more money than me!"

We need to get people out of this kind of thinking, and the sooner the better.

Aha, good luck with that. Entire human history is full of such social differentiation, where a particular group, caste, nation, etc. think that they are better and deserve more than the others.

MBAs, in my experience, is the worst example of it. They treat themselves as some higher order creatures, without actual skills or understanding of things.

$NOT_CODE is cheap, show me the code.

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