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Comment by JSR_FDED | Hacker News Reader

When I was a developer I thought “without me all the people in the building have nothing to sell and they can all just go home”.

Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.

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You should have stopped at 90 degrees ;)

Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.

I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.

Sales is part of the capitalism layer that sits atop the actual work. Same as CEOs and finance. None of them do useful work, only decide what useful work gets done. In communism you couldn't sell software without a Party representative - that doesn't mean he's useful.

A less cynical take is that sales connects the people who need a problem solved to the people who can solve it.

Modern sales pipelines don't behave this way in my experience.

A very common approach to sales nowadays is to invent a problem that someone does not have and then try to sell them your tool that fixes the problem

Or they try to map the problem you have to the problem they solve, even if they are actually quite different problems

The biggest problem that sales is trying to solve is that you aren't buying anything from them

Yeah, I see this. I think in that case, both the sales and development team are deadweight (ie self licking ice cream cones)

I think the development team's work in this scenario is more akin to basic research. There is still some chance they may discover something unexpected.

It’s not basic research in the vast, vast majority of business cases you’re describing. They aren’t Bell Labs doing novel work, they’re usually doing busy work on mundane apps. I’m not going to move our understanding of financial physics forward playing around with a social media or CRUD app. Hell, most work isn’t even testing a hypothesis other than “I hope this change doesn’t break shit”

It comes across as “everyone else’s work is trivial and low value but my, MY, work is difficult and important”. We shouldn’t be so precious.

sqlite came out of a CRUD app developer being unsatisfied with his database options

I took “basic research” to mean “fundamental research”. Sqlite is not fundamental research. It’s an exception that proves the rule. It was literally designed for a solving a specific problem. Somewhat ironically, it also comes from the industry that originated the term “self-licking ice cream cone”. An occasional useful offshoot doesn’t justify massive amounts of otherwise less useful busywork

Basic research is research done without an obvious application. In the same way, development can be done without an obvious application. All those mathematicians studying prime numbers in the 1600s-1800s came in useful later when we invented good cryptography.

Right. As you said, sqlite was developed to fill a specific need, therefore it’s applied research and not basic research. (I wouldn’t even consider it research, but more development, but I’m trying to be generous to the discussion)

Sales connects the pocket of the people who need a problem solved to the pocket of the people who invested on the company that promises to solve it.

Who convinces the pockets of the rich people that they have a problem to solve? Is that marketing?

Two things can be true simultaneously. Neither function works without the other.

The conjoined triangles of success.

Anywhere we can read some of your story? I'm always curious about devs that went into sales, or sales from a dev perspective

And without the farmers pulling the potatoes out of the ground, we would all starve and die. So who is necessary, really?

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