Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

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> clients will come back to us saying "XYZ says they can get better performance"

Oh yes, good old marketing.

Along with buying off "Industry Awards" – hey, we're objectively the "Best cybersecurity company of 2022!" With a matching "platinum/gold badge" to go on our website! Or buying a place in the "10 Best Products for X" and "Independent X-vs-Y Comparison", another classic.

Because it works. Are your customers not sophisticated? Are they unable (or unwilling) to follow up on defects and outright lies? Or reality simply doesn't matter all that much to them? Humans LOVE a good story more than reality, after all.

Then your contribution as an engineer to your company's success, and hence its longevity and your job security, is strictly inferior to that of marketing. Not everything is the work of evil marketers – a lot of the supplied BS is in response to an existing demand for BS.

> Are your customers not sophisticated? Are they unable (or unwilling) to follow up on defects and outright lies?

You would probably be depressed if you knew who our customers were, and how technologically unsophisticated they are.

I manage at a client an application which is the actual leader (most top right and by far) in Gartner magic quadrant for its category, and for years, I have never seen a product this bad, where the implementors and supports are clueless of their own product. And obviously it's buggy as hell.

Lies and deceptions.

The people who make the decisions don't use the product. That's almost always the root cause of this stuff. I worked on a system for my state - another vendor came in and 'took over' all the functionality my system handled. Supposedly. 7 years later, my system powers the exception to the mandate to 'use system X', because... they refuse to provide the functionality that they sold the state. Contractually, "we provide feature ABC", but the reality is.. they don't. I even provided them our code to use - it was paid for with public money, they should just integrate it and then sell it to other people to make their product better. They can't even be bothered to take the code and integrate it... they prefer to continually lie and say "we provide feature ABC" when... they don't. It's beyond insane. A large majority of the people on the ground know it's bad/lacking/broken, but ... they have 0 voice in the matter.

Gartner is it’s own confidence trick. They don’t rate you unless you pay them to rate you. It’s manufactured reputation extortion by another name.

With a handle like Foobar8568, why not be more specific? It sounds like you might have a good story.

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