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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I wish marketers realized that as a developer, and a senior one at that, I have no say in what software my company pays for. I have a daily flood of messages from salespeople on email, linkedin, even text and calls asking me to "try out <hot SaaS product> for your team", and I get frustrated trying to explain that no, that's now how things work at corporations beyond a certain size. A simple software license or subscription that will make me significantly more productive in my daily works takes several rounds of approval from different departments maybe lasting months, and is more often than not denied. And this is for something that costs $10. I am not going to get them to switch to your CRM.

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I assume you're working in a big company? In small company as a dev I have almost all the decision power regarding which software to choose, at the end I just need to justify the cost to management.

Yes, but then marketers and sales reps are mostly trying to sell to big companies. Smaller deals are usually self serve.

This sounds like exactly the kind of force-multiplying work a senior developer should be doing, though.

I totally agree that it's ridiculous and sucks to do, but that also sounds like incredibly high ROI on your time.

Spending a month filling out paperwork to save every dev in the company 15 minutes a day or whatever would be a massive win. Like an "I deserve a promotion" level win.

I get what you mean, though. I've fought to bring products in a couple of times, and it's one of my least favorite tasks. It's endless meetings, and nobody on the other teams is super helpful because they're not going to get a bonus if this works out.

Edit: Another thought; spending your time making procurement easier might also be a worthwhile endeavor, if you could get the buy-in from someone that procurement will listen to.

Lots of reasons to still talk to you.

- it costs them nothing to 'reach out'

- your company might not be so bureaucratic

- you might be willing to set up shadow IT (run software without permission)

- you might move to another company that is more permissive

- they might be able to roll up developer interest into an enterprise-level sales pitch

Reaching out isn't necessarily zero cost. There are several software vendors I have blacklisted in my mind because they incessantly send me emails.

Yeah, "it costs nothing to reach out" when there's a low percentage of recipients who will be interested is exactly how we we got to the current equilibrium of "developers just ignore marketing emails". Individually, it might seem like there's no cost, but collectively they've all made their job a lot harder by making it not worth developers' time to try to sift through the noise and try to find signal.

True. I wrote that from the perspective of a sales process trying not to waste time.

As far as risking being annoying, it's an unfortunate reality that you come out way ahead in sales if you talk to a lot of people, even if you make a fraction of them hate you along the way. That's even true when selling to programmers. But it does have externalities as all the sales teams collectively evolve their tactics to keep cutting through.

no, you should set up in person meetings with them, livestreamed on youtube, and jerk them around for awhile, covering them with glitter at the end.

Why reply? This is spam, it might not even be worth deleting regularly, let alone arguing with salespeople.

When they do "realize" that, B2B companies end up building products that are evaluated by procurement managers but not end users. Lots of examples in the industry.

So I'd really rather most didn't come to that realization. And, well, we as developers do have some influence.

Not everyone works in large slow beraucratic companies though.

You may have side projects as well.

Also there's tools that are borderline personal, some I use or used: Quokka.js, GitKraken, GitHub Copilot.

Isn't there some kind of common threshold for higher management approval, like five hundred bucks, that enterprise software sales try to slip under ?

The problem isn't usually dollar amounts, but stuff like security, data storage, compliance.

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