Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation.

Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :)

To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.

Funny, similar thing happened to me.

IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM.

I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.

It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.

This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks.

Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it.

Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem.

Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowledge, because folks at that level have full days crammed with higher-level decisions. So it's more plausible for sales to pitch {insert whatever buzzwordy, batshit crazy idea} and have it fly.

To add on, it's also a standard negotiation tactic for a negotiator to try and speak to the highest-ranking person possible. This tactic was specifically recommended by a guest speaker at a Stanford Business School seminar about how to negotiate uploaded to YouTube (timestamped to 31:59 for the relevant bit). [0]

[0] (Seminar from 2007) https://youtu.be/rCmvMDrCWjs?t=1919

Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.

That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.

But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM."

I knew a couple of people who got fired after getting their org sucked into WebSphere. Long time ago but it does happen occasionally.

They were fired because of WebSphere?

The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.

The "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing expired decades ago, that mantle passed on to Microsoft. Last 5 - 10 years, nobody gets fired for architecting dozens of microservices in the cloud.

One would think the decision makers would trust the technical advice of the smart people they've hired instead of the opinion of some obviously lying salesman...

"If they're smart, why are they working for me?"

Yeah except that a lot of - not all - executives maintain something akin to class solidarity with other executives at big companies, especially their big vendors..

Because at some point they might want/need another job, and so often times it's better to help each other out, at the expense of the folks lower down.

Those folks are useless to them, personally, but that VP at Big Vendor probably isn't.

Considering that the buzzword shooting, smooth talking sales rep offering an easy to solution to, well, all of the problems is much closer to how most C-Level guys (in established companies at least) think, I'm not surprised anymore. This till manages to chock me from time to time, so.

Yup - I had the same "your guy is a problem, he's anti-innovation." The brilliant thing was that they rang the CEO of the business unit who was at that time +4 on me and had never met me. He was flummoxed and invited me for lunch to find out how I'd made such a big impression! Did me loads of good!

It sure sounds like IBM were bad. But it sounds like your company was even worse, the way your bosses' boss behaved.

Well, no. In the end they backed my reco and we didnt go IBM. I feel like I did inconvenience my managers though, and indeed left not long afterwards for a better job.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the common phrase at our company in the 1990s. At the time, that was certainly true. Which lead to adoption of truly awful tech, token-ring over type-1 cable, versus ethernet over twisted pair.

I was involved in a small project, and we were running low on the money runway for next phase. The IBM sales guy literally barged into a FORTUNE 50 CIOs office, without an appointment, asking for budget to be approved for the next phase. project continued, but I never saw the sales guy again. The team had a good chuckle and I never understood what the guy was thinking he would achieve with this tactic.

IMHO that is like kids and lying. More often than not, the right answer to the question "Why are you doing this, when we always catch you?" is "Because it works more often than you catching me lying and also because you don't even get that".

Stories like this about IBM were handed down to me by my father. They've been doing this a long time!

My first instinct is that this would be a short term strategy that trades off the company’s good name for marginal sales, but I guess not!

There's a sucker born every minute.

> Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays.

I had a former Oracle employee use a similar line in an interview for a software engineer position. After repeatedly refusing to answer technical questions then admitting they hadn't written software in over a decade:

"I'm actually good friends with someone high up in Company."

You perfectly demonstrated why they shouldn’t be speaking to you. Their schtick is crafted to work on levels where you don’t get to tank the deal until it’s way too late and egos are now on the line.

My first Oracle experience was similar. Back in the 90s, I was tasked with replacing our old mssql6.5 generic custom built rack log server with something stronger as the product was successful and we had money.

Oracle put me in touch with their eval solutions people who took all my info on number of users, transactions, size, etc and came back with an estimate of a $2M Sun+Oracle box. I told them that the current solution ran on like $10k of licenses and hardware and they revised the spec down to $250k.

They were totally clueless but projected absolute competence.

A little psychological manipulation and marketing gimmicks (including overdressed people and marketing directed to CXOs) goes a long way.

> You must take us to your leader.

LOL, it sounds like General Zod in Superman II (1981). You should have asked if they want you to kneel before them as well.

It was both funny and scary as if I was reached by demanding aliens who were watching me :)

I didn't know what to do, so I simply start marking it as spam and moved on. I guess they had a sales pitch based on the stuff I looked at.

What are these shirts? I must know!

I don't know but my manager was a non-technical guy with passion for fashion and even his shirts weren't as nice!

Unfortunately, still don't know what you're talking about. Probably because I don't have expertise in the area. Am imaging some kind of white-collar business shirt that's... platinum plated? If the design is not extravagant, how would anyone know?

These are the best ones I've ever worn : https://turnbullandasser.co.uk/products/white-west-indian-se...

For the price you'd want them to be.

640$, lol

My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying.

It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO.

Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the industry and a nobody will need to flash large and expensive cameras to justify the price asked.

Think what it it tells about you to wear really nice shirt. Firstly, it implies that you already sold something to someone for a lot of money and you got paid and bought that shirt, right? Secondly it implies dominance at least in one area, you are the person with the best shirt in the room so who knows what else you are best at. Silly but our primate brains easily get intimidated and extrapolate. There are also many other fallacies that our brains easily fall in, so looking impressive is a superpower actually.

Also, everything is a costume. If you are interviewing for a nerdy position you better look like a nerd but you can always be the nerd with the best nerdy shirt.

"Three wolves howling at the moon," might do it. :-D

The nerd costume is a costume too. If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a battered hoodie in a meeting with a bunch of suits, then everyone is going to defer to me on technical matters

Maybe. Mostly they want to keep you on board long enough to find out who writes the cheques.

I have multiple articles of clothing that cost more than that. I’m baffled as to why anyone would want a keyboard that costs more than $100. To each his own.

The keyboardio keyboard I'm typing on (A Model 1) puts substantially less stress on my hands and wrists than any other keyboard I've used. As someone who has had repetitive stress pain in my wrists, I consider it - well, not beyond price, but certainly worth a few hundred dollars when it avoids surgery and enables me to pursue a HIGHLY lucrative profession full time. Each person's hands are different, so maybe you do fine with an inexpensive keyboard, and my keyboard won't suit everyone, but it's a fairly straightforward explanation the way I see it.

Keyboards that cost over $100 tend to be much, much nicer, and are more easily tailored to an individual's taste.

Around $200 and above, most are machined from aluminum, and require the user to supply their own switches and keycaps. My daily driver, whose USB connector seems to be reaching EOL, is a heavy-ass chunk of bright blue Alu, makes noise like a machine gun when I need to correct someone on the internet, and has limited edition keycaps in a fun (imo) purple-and-cyan color scheme. Total cost of this thing was probably $250~$300, but I'm happy.

I have over $1k worth of keyboards and related hardware strewn about my apartment, and the only reason I've considered selling some of my collection is to buy fancier pieces. To each their own.

A crisp, blinding white, heavy oxford cotton shirt that requires cufflinks is noticed by everybody but nerds. In financial circles you can even wear colored shirts but don't stray from blue or pink.

The people who wear those shirts also have expensive shoes. Get the tie right and you can get away with a slightly less expensive suit for technical sales meetings.

A clean shave and neat, well cut hair help too.

Its interesting to look at shoes, tells you a lot about a persons status in a big organisation.

Having said that, my daughter bought me some checkerboard vans so I wear those everywhere now.

Aren't shirts in that range having diminshing returns? like couldn't get a $100 shirt that covers most of the benefits? there has to be a optimal local maximum there right?

Not if you’re in sales, I’d guess. It almost literally tells your target C-suite that you’re cut from the same cloth and to ignore the bleating of underlings. It’s a peripheral cue calibrated to increase bonding and trust. “These are my people. I’m safe with them.”

I guess it's sortof like going into a "hackers" convention and seeing people typing on a 3$ Dell keyboard. Those are not our people. However, the guys in the corner with DasKeyboard or Happy Hacking Keyboard; those ARE our people.

Nothing exotic but extremely good quality and attention to details that you can recognise from distance. No button looks off the shelf, no detail is cheap out. The cut matches the body perfectly and elegantly and the designer and manufacturer definitely went the extra mile even if it wasn't the easiest or cheapest thing to do. Maybe cutting in straight lines would be the easiest way to do it but if the design requires a slight curve, they wouldn't shy away from it. The more you look at it the more details you notice that someone must have agonised over it even if it wouldn't make any functional difference. Just because it's not visible all the time, doesn't mean that can't have a nice design, for example inside the collar has also a seperate design.

I think @sgt101 is onto something.

To expand on this, because I think some of the confusion is probably from more basic concepts...

Clothing patterns, stitching, and details differ in manufacturing time and suitability for mass production.

The vast majority of clothing is optimized for production, because time is expense, and therefore less time is more profit.

In men's sizing, we generally come in fewer shapes. Square-to-athletic-to-slim fit + arm length + overall size.

But for most people, there's still going to be a delta between {hypothetical optimal fit} and {nearest mass-market fit}. So a nice shirt really starts at doing whatever it takes to get closer to optimal fit (even if it requires some difficult, hand-sewn-only magic) and adds better materials and finishes (buttons, button-holes, stitching, etc).

At the end of the day, it's kind of like watches though -- 95% of people won't recognize the differences. I got more complements from C-level folks on my $50 quartz Casio diver [0], because it copies a lot of Rolex details, than anything mechanical without plastic.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/bmld2y/casio_duro_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com