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Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

I always love to piss off my tech friends by reminding them that Microsoft didn't get to where it was by having the best engineering in the world.. Sales, Marketing and making hard deals that put their products in front of the most customers.

I'm not saying I love their tactics but the "Build it and they will come" really is a field of dreams and young engineers are all dreamers thinking Sales and Marketing is a waste of people and money.

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Actually, Microsoft got where it was by being able to reliably make software. They where the first company to be able to built just about anything. Windows, Excel, Word, Access, Outlook where all just copy's that overtook the original. Now days it does not seem like a big deal, but Bill Gates was a software developer and knew how to get things done when most large companies are incapable of writing software. He also happened to be rich, well connected, and ruthless which is how he became the richest guy in the world.

PS: But, here is the thing. Your probably not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, or Mark Zuckerburg, but if you can't write code I know your not in their league because they could code. They may not have been great developers but they know enough to understand what's going on which is necessarily in a co-founder even if their not 'technical' they should learn enough to understand what's happening. Getting a start-up off the ground is 100 times harder than learning the basic of software development so yes I use it as a filter when evaluating non technical people.

And yet Microsoft did have the best engineers in the world. And Bill Gates was also a software engineer.

Yeah, but technical credits are easly demonstrated. Sales and Marketing are squishier.

I've been through half a dozen startups. They each go through several Sales teams before they're done - try some guys, sorry not working, get some more. What does that tell you?

It tells me the leadership of those companies don't understand sales performance. :)

Sales people have the greatest jobs really! They either perform or they don't.. Its easy to measure and easier to take action.

Sales people, assuming commission is a large portion of their compensation as is common, are the absolute easiest to measure -"Show me your w2 form from your last job".

That isn't how it works.

What if the person had a compensation package which paid really well for selling a product which could be sold by over promising? Their W2 would look awesome but the company would be screwed. I would be most cautious of business people leaving a job with a strong w2. Also it is important to see relative performance. What if they are making 100k and their coworkers are bringing home 500k? Are they still good then?

Probably that the people assessing the sales team at a hiring stage made mistakes. You're right, though: it is hard to hire sales/marcomms people.

In the same way as a layman hiring a technical guy might not know what to look out for ("This guy knows ActionScript and says that's what we should build our web app in! He's a great developer!"), a layman hiring sales or marketing people is going to get shafted.

Good sales people are at least as scarce as good engineers. The best ones can sell anything, so why would they bother selling subscriptions to your web app for a $20 commission when they can sell oil refinery equipment for a $200k commission? They aren't interested in challenges or doing new and innovative things like engineers are. They're economically driven.

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