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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

One reason why one goes to college is to learn how to learn social acclimation around people wealthier than you are, because this is a useful skill in convincing them to give you things that you want. A company, and the decisionmakers thereof, is almost by definition richer than you are, and broadly representative of an entire class of entities whose behaviors are totally opaque to you if you've never worked in one (+). That would be unfortunate, because those entities have budgets and are willing to spend them on you if you know how to work with them.

+ People who have never worked in a megacorp often think that their literal internal decisionmaking model is "MAXIMIZE THE EVIL.", which is both wrong and will not allow you to successfully predict their behavior.

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Are there one or two things you would recommend to help bridge that communication gap between a solo person and a megacorp? One thing I've observed (possibly incorrectly!) is that megacorps seem to "like" to do business with other megacorps.

Rule #1: all megacorps are, like Soylent Green, made out of people. If you want to sell something to Microsoft, you aren't selling it to Microsoft, you're selling it to one or a few identifiable people within Microsoft. The entity we think is Microsoft is the sum of the emergent behaviors of lots of little Microsoftite particles which are bouncing around in Brownian motion.

After you understand that, it's VASTLY easier to get Microsoft to give you money, and you might find that Microsoft (or whatever BigCo) you're dealing with considers More Money Than I've Ever Dreamed Of (TM) to be a fairly routine decision, in the same manner that you might decide to purchase a new keyboard.

In terms of communication style: learn to talk to business people. ROI and TCO over TDD and DRY, PowerPoint decks over README.md in your Github projects, wearing a suit when appropriate instead of making fun of people who own one, etc etc. It's really not hard to learn how to talk like someone if you listen attentively. You've done this your entire life in other contexts and other communities. Decisionmakers at BigCo are not intrinsically a more hostile audience than, e.g., your local freestyle rap club meetup thing, the rhymes are just different, yo. [1]

[1] I should stick to WoW metaphors, but you get the general idea.

It should be noted that 'wearing a suit' is not just wearing your normal thinkgeek t-shirt with a suit jacket over the top.

Spot on.

I'm in the process to write a book about this. Are people (young people especially) interested in understanding how to position technology into the enterprise?

People like doing business with those they know, trust, have worked with before, etc, etc.. and major corps recruit heavily from one another.

It's quite common for someone to jump ship and then turn around and do business (or even just recommend) their old company for something.

That's part of the reason burning bridges is such a horrible idea.. because it's a small world after all. It's a small, small world.

"One reason why one goes to college is to learn how to learn social acclimation around people wealthier than you are, because this is a useful skill in convincing them to give you things that you want."

This is probably one of the hardest (and most valuable) lessons I have learned in college. If you don't take the time to develop your social skills, life is going to kick you in the teeth. Repeatedly.

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