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Comment by dumpsterdiver | Hacker News Reader

> Software jobs are one of the few remaining ones where we still hold the means of production

Typical software jobs absolutely do not "hold the means of production".

The aforementioned "means of production" likely includes years of work from an entire sales team in order to land paying customers in the first place. What good are the "means of production" when no one is buying your product?

Cool, you built a useful piece of software... are you ready to pay a cool million to your sales people to actually get it out the door? No? Well then you don't own the means of production. You own a pipe dream.

How about paying for all of those cloud servers that your customers run on? When you write code does it also automatically pay your cloud server bills? Guess what, those servers are required to actually run the god-granted code that you put on this earth.

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Typical software jobs absolutely do not "hold the means of production".

The aforementioned "means of production" likely includes years of work from an entire sales team in order to land paying customers in the first place.

that's the means of sales.

You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.

Unless you are just trying to grift people, which a disappointingly large percentage of the tech/Silicon Valley/startup crowd are totally cool with.

> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.

I would argue that software that exists with no one to sell it is actually MUCH less valuable than a salesman with nothing to sell, because someone has poured countless hours of blood, sweat and tears into that code, and without a salesperson that developer will receive a terrible return on their investment.

A salesperson with nothing to sell on the other hand is simply a salesperson looking for a job. They have not expended the hours creating a product that will never sell.

Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it. The salesperson hasn’t demonstrated they can sell and has nothing of value other than their potential; just like all the other salespeople looking for jobs. A pretty easy class of people to join.

> Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it.

How is "the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it" relevant?

When a developer spends time on code that no one ever pays money for, whoever is employing that developer has lost money, probably a lot of it.

When a salesperson sits at home unemployed, it costs the company who will eventually employ them nothing.

How in the world are you trying to claim a sunken cost fallacy in this case? Did you respond to the wrong post? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.

> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.

Never seen that happen. Software that exists with no one to sell it just doesn't get sold.

On the other hand, a salesman with nothing to sell is Bill Gates when he signed on to provide MS DOS for IBM.

In fact, if you look over the history of this industry, success has, with few exceptions, always been sales-first, then development effort.

It's why we prioritise MVP: do the minimum necessary that we can sell, so that the dev effort is not wasted. At it's core, MVP would involve absolutely no development at all.

Is this just a difference of perspective? Seems like GP's point was that software has latent value, and differentiation, and the act of selling is commodifiable.

Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?

I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.

> Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?

At this point in time ... well, yes.

Just about any software that a business needs is, at this point in time, already written, with few exceptions.

For almost any MVP, at this point in time, you can gauge market interest using something that already exists.

> I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.

Those were different times, and even those different times things like UNIX were mostly differentiated only by sales-efforts of the hardware vendors.

There was a time when people had to be sold on the idea of the internet being at all useful. It had to be sold.

Sales was always and continues to be separate from production. Production has always needed tools and inputs. You're not pointing out anything about software that's different from what Marx would have seen in a factory.

What are the software sales people going to sell if there are no software developers to build their product?

In a way you're both right - software developers (usually) don't create/design/sell the entire product end-to-end, but they no doubt are a critical piece of the process. That gives them leverage.

> What are the software sales people going to sell if there are no software developers to build their product?

Uh, none. Just like no one would sell vacuum cleaners if there weren't companies that actually manufactured vacuum cleaners. As with any other product that is being massively manufactured though, you still need to sell it to someone when you actually have it.

You might similarly ask, how are all of these plumbing companies going to stay in business without plumbers? Well, it's because plumbers typically work for plumbing businesses. Just the same as how software developers typically work for software companies.

Everything else: cars, furniture, electronics, building materials, power tools, you name it.

Plenty of functions are critical to the business - sales, marketing, finance, business development, etc.

Indeed. I'm not sure why tech workers have this viewpoint that every other corporate function adds little to nothing to the bottom line.

"Build it and they will come" is not how it works. There is a reason why very successful sales people often make more money than tech workers.

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