ewams

Two questions?

Are you in the USA?

Are you getting a true commission, as in a percentage of the sale or contract value or are you just getting a bonus / referral / finder's fee?

Commissions are not normal for consultants at consulting shops or services companies, at least in the States. Sometimes it is possible to strike a one off deal with a sales team to get a bonus, but definitely not a commission.

Have both been a consultant and sold consulting services, now I'm at a product company doing presales. At consulting shops it's normal for consultants to get a straight salary and then a bonus for hitting a certain billable hour % or total hours for some period (like monthly, quarterly, etc).

There are these things called SPIFFs, basically a bonus for doing something specific, such as demoing a certain product, installing a product with a new feature, etc that consultants sometimes can qualify for. But again, straight commission is not normal. If you find a place that does, it might be a good place to stay!

Unless, they give you a quota then guess what... you aren't a consultant, you are an SE.

I assume you are a consultant at this new place? Relationships are how sales are won. These other people saying it is fishy are not giving you objective advice, this is absolutely normal. Have you never asked someone else for an introduction, reference, or info about to another person or company? This is the same thing.

Depending on how it was communicated to you and that person's personality may have made it seem like a requirement, which it is not. But it is probably a good idea to help for several reasons:

It helps the company increase sales which means they stay alive.

Improves the likelyhood of you having a project.

You, hopefully, are working for a company that has a product(s) which solves business needs, so you would be helping both your contact's company and yours.

It improves your relationship with your original contact and the sales team.

Gives you an opportunity to try some light sales skills, something you may be interested in the future.

I am southern and raised to always be respectful and refuse to sell my soul. With that, you should never feel required to do an introduction or push a product/service when that is not your job or you do not feel it is appropriate. Somes sales people may not like this, but fuck them and their boats.

Feel free to reach out if you want to chat more. I have been working on a sales engineer book which includes information similar to these situations. I'll share it when done.

Good luck!

In many instances I would argue relationships in the B2B sale are more important than price. I have both lost and won many deals because of only the relationship.

Just recently a fairly large one we lost had a fantastic ROI, about a 10% ramp time to the competition, and even had the CTO's buy in. But we lost and found out it was bc the VP was neighbors to the other sales rep and he convinced the CTO not to buy from us. From what I can gather from the other folks that were championing for me was mostly untrue FUD was used by this VP, all in an effort to help his buddy. Their cost was supposedly ~30% higher and I usually stomp that product to the ground - because of business cases.

Hey folks, put this little tool together to compliment some other work I am doing. Feel free to check it out, provide feedback, and share along.

http://cpupricing.com/

I wrote my own in php years ago... ewams.net

Most of the things I post are not directly tied to my current job but more of things I am interested in, like the cpu sizing tool I wrote http://ewams.net/specintd/ or web scraping, security, data integrity, etc. Just something to store my research in really.

Just get started!

And SUSEcon starts tomorrow in Nashville. Anyone else going?

It always has potholes. Have been there several times and you can tell they patch it but the heavy excavation vehicles and the temperature probably play a big part. City folk underestimate what true darkness really is, and each time I have been we always have the same thought as you but you get so captivated in this unique environment that you just don't want to leave!

Also for folks not familiar with USA roads, you can be on a State Highway, US Highway, or even the Interstate system and still be pothole ridden. Every state has jokes about their roads being the worst and the neighboring being the best (and they all think they are unique). Just the nature of roadways and government management.

Just in a poorly formatted word doc currently. I'd be happy to contact you when its closer. Thanks for asking!

All the comments and the story seem to be coming from people that have been around sales or briefly touched it but never been full in a sales position. It's definitely true that "enterprise" sales has a different sales cycle than commercial or smb. I've had seven and eight figure deals close faster than a small 6 figure deal. I also have found smaller organizations need much more care and feeding after the sale than larger companies. But of course this is not true for every organization or sale.

I empathize with his part on gear that sat there for years after the sale. Welcome to business, it happens everywhere. I've been on both the purchasing side and the selling side of it. Things just happen, just like we all mean to change the world or pick up a hobby but something else shiny gets in the way. But it's not a reason to give up on sales.

Politics are a part of everything. Engineers (or anyone) that refuse to accept this are just cutting their eyes out to spite their brain. If, on the sales side, you ignore the politics of the organization it is no wonder you struggle. The same is true for people in their own organization that can't get anything done, don't get promoted, or can't make friends.

Sales sucks. When you spend days, weeks, months, even years on a deal and you don't win you get nothing. Sometimes you even lose your job. Sales is expensive in more ways than just money or time and it is not for everyone.

I enjoyed reading your piece but the negativity in it is from frustration at lack of understanding. Just because you are not good at something does not mean it is bad or evil. I love basketball, but I am horrible at it, so I know realistically I will never be in the NBA. But because I do know what goes in to it I can truly respect those people that do. You can learn from others for things you are not good it, but why kid yourself? Focus what you are good at and become even better.

Michael Jordan was an amazing athlete, totally dominating basketball. He tried his hand at baseball and did decently but realized being just "decent" at it was all he would probably be and went back to what he excelled in, basketball.

I need to finish my book on sales and consulting geared towards engineers.

Could you explain a little better on how this works?

Never will I use, stay on a team that uses, or assist any client which uses zip ties for cable management.

Anyone that says "we will just do this temprarily" will get charged double and need to send that statement in writing with firm start and end dates along with the consequence of not meeting the deadline.

Once your average deal size hits >$250k touch nothing less than $100k if it's a new client, leave it to inside sales.

If someone (or a business) has ever paid you for anything they never get free work. Free product? Maybe, but never free work.

Put it in a contract, regardless if buying or selling, or it doesn't exist. When asked to modify something on the fly from that contract, "we'll let you know" is the only acceptable answer until you review with your team.

"I don't know but will try to find out" is acceptable. "Yes if..." is preferred.

"No." Can help you live longer and healthier.

Welcome to Nashville! We love the growth and all the culture that comes with it. Hit me up if you have any questions, been here for 14 years after trying NY, Cali and Florida.

"A gallon of milk costs a farmer approximately $1.90 to produce, but in the last year, farmers have been receiving as little as $1.35 per gallon."

If it cost more to make it than they are getting, why are milk prices not higher?

I've had this same conversation but concerning ages when normal things happen. Look at when people got married and had children in 1860 vs 1960 vs 2018. In this short amount of time people went from having children being normal from 12-14 to 18-30, to 25-40. Yes people still have children at young ages but it is more of a norm to do it later. Just look at all the HN articles talking about that the last couple years. Then listen to conversations when you hear about a 22 year old marrying a 16 year old, things get said like "pedophile" and "gross" and "thats just wrong." Even though not too long ago that was normal.

And that feedback is just from the States. Other countries and regions are different. Maybe here 18 is a magical age where you become an adult but in the far East its 16. In Amazonia it is 13. (I just made those numbers up, I do not know).

Makes you wonder, what is normal or moral to me that is just learned behavior and not really normal or moral?

Where do you live to have 25% loss to taxes from the state + City? Your marginal is 25% to fed... Is this those weird PA taxes? 50% is lol material or you are getting scammed by your accountant.

Read about the Carnton Plantation, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnton

It was a temporary field hospital for the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee. It doesn't talk about it in the wiki page but if you search for "Carnton house blood stains" or go on a tour yourself you can see how horrific it was. Quite literally you can see the blood stained floorboards today from the civil war. You can still walk on them.

There is a place on the second floor where one of the surgeons had a bucket on the floor to hold his tools and the entire floor around it is stained with blood except for a small ring from the bucket which is unstained.

Highly recommend a tour of the house, grounds, and small museum especially if you like history. Plus let me know if you are in town. ;)

For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard (anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles from current home. Just different county.

Skylake cpu? Which model?

Assuming using 32GB dimms to use all six lanes (if Skylake)? This is something that has bit me a few times - most Skylake cpus have 6 lanes, so balanced is 192, 384, etc. Not 4 lanes like we are used to!

Would also recommend trying different ram configs anyways, on our side we have seen better thru put on 768 than on 384. Even 512 performs better in some cases than 192.

Not every airport actively uses TSA and this is what they do.

This is exactly how the market works and will continue to as long as humans are involved.

First hand experience here that seems to escape the engineering brethren that have never glimpsed into sales: The same exact product is sold to every customer at a different price. Yes sometimes there is a higher demand which might push price a tad but most of the time there is not. I always enjoy when people on HN complain that so-and-so doesn't publish pricing on their website. Of course not, because then they would lower their revenue. It also removes leverage, sometimes it makes sense to sell something at a lower cost today to negotiate some terms, and then down the road either sell at volume or raise the price. Sometimes you just like someone and give them a discount. Oh its the government? Yea raise the price a LOT. etc etc.

Have been doing this with savings and checking accounts at Ally Bank for over 8 years. Have stuff broken down into emergency fund, slush fund, home buying fund, monthly bills, regular checking, funny money, and some "business" labeled accounts for side projects. You can create an account in about a minute when logged in, though to remove an account you do have to call in, but they have no problem doing it. I have open and closed accounts several times a year when a project dries up or we change how doing finances.

It also doesn't hurt that they have good interest rates, no foreign expense costs, and don't charge for things like debit cards, checks, autodraft, bill pay, etc.

I do think they are USA only though. Not sure how it works for non US citizens.

Just so you know I was being serious.

u "Should be able to do all this for about $2,500"

dem "really? You must be joking"

u "hehe, yea I have a funny sense of humor. I meant $25 thousand, not 25 hundred, har har"

dem "oh ok, heres your money"

u "thank you"

Congrats on the release. VLC, or "the cone", as some non-technical people call it is a household name. We have not been able to use it as a verb yet but when you can answer so many questions with "just use VLC" you know you have an amazing product. Thank you for the hard work and keeping VLC relevant.

Not in reality in the corporate space. Maybe AMD has a chance in commercial unless this destroys Intel but probably won't. Intel is the only x86 cpu I've seen my customers not have issues with. People are moving off power and sparc to x86 because of costs. These costs are not initial purchase but more of operations and maintenance. Applications are being less and less supported on non-x86 architecture. Arm is great but have not seen much movement into corporate. For x86, AMD has had stability issues for years running enterprise apps. I have made a lot of money troubleshooting issues for customers only to find out it's an execution bug on AMD. A lot of new software companies only support Intel cpu's as well. Why pay for making an HCL on two separate architectures when you really only need 1?

I disagree with their suggestion to comment out or remove old PHP code. People need to have a date and timestamp at their top of the articles AND state what version of PHP they are coding for.

Information on older version should not be pruned as there are legitimate reasons to keep them. Not everyone is using PHP 7; what do you do when you inherit an older code base; what do you do when you just need to modify a few things on an older code base; what if you are trying to learn security based programming; what if you are trying to learn how to break into systems (to then learn how to protect them); what if PHP7 is not available or feasible for your project; etc.

Right, there is no such thing as a firewall or ACL that can block a type of packet... even though it is so common even consumer products have the ability: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Sha...

Pretty common in our industry to use apostrophes after an acronym to make it plural. An example is VM's and VMS are two different things. When you get lazy and do vm's and vms you can not always be sure, I have even written an email where I stated "we need multiple VMS VM's".

You are correct this wasn't the article I was looking for, didn't read it to verify. I can't find it now but 1-2 years ago some people used that dish to reactivate a "lost" satellite that had not been used for several years.

Know the big dish from James Bond? Used legit: http://observer.com/2014/08/civilians-in-abandoned-mcdonalds...

Went for 3 weeks as tourist and after typing this up it looks like I need to make a blog post.

For #1, unless something changed they allow chain hotels and some other big chain spots to get through it. I had no problem using any services, google, yahoo, etc at those locations. There was a couple of hotspots we went to where it would block you but I just connected to my work's VPN that runs in the States. Hopefully you are not going to China to use the Internet, you can survive without it for 2 weeks.

You can download google translate for offline translations. Have used this for Mandarin, Spanish and Italian and works great. One thing to know though is China has lots of different dialects, some of them are similar (like Mexican Spanish vs Puerto Rican Spanish) but others are quite different, to the point of someone that speaks mainland may not be able to communicate with someone from this other village or coastal town. In the big cities you mentioned this should not be a problem (I went all over so had some problems a few times). Learn things like thank you, water, bathroom, food, train, yes, no and you can survive almost anywhere. Since you are going for work you will probably have other people around you that know the area, language, good spots, places to avoid, etc.

Before you go, I would ask your company: is there going to be a translator, driver, guide? Drivers and guides can be had for cheap.

---#4--- You can not miss going to a mall there. Hear me out, a mall is like its own self contained city. 5+ stories. Has everything from food, to tech, to salons, clothes, etc and it is absolutely humbling, amazing, wonderful and fun to walk around, window show, or actually shop.

The food. I ate better the 3 weeks I was there than anywhere else I have ever been. Go to hot pot (pay by the hour!). Go to dim sum. Eat vendor food. Find a place and have pigeon, real peking duck (where they cut it and serve it at your table for you), and jelly fish.

Find a fish / sea market. I went to one where quite literally you could not see the ends of the thing from where I was standing because it was so long (and well yes there was smog).

If you can find any sort of palace (aka mansion / estate) I would highly recommend it.

The obvious tourist traps are obvious for a reason, The Great Wall, Forbidden City, etc.

--#5-- Unless you get some Yuans from your bank at home don't both with conversion services, just go to your bank in China or any ATM. If you use a credit card and they ask you if you want them to change the charge to USD for you the answer is always no (they charge a fee and conversion is not always accurate) - use this anytime abroad. Also make sure your CC has no foreign transaction fees and you call them and your bank to let them know where you will be so they do not block your card.

EVERYTHING is negotiable. But be aware once you show the cash or order the item the deal is locked. See something you want to buy? Point to it, and ask "how much?" or just shrug and they will barter with you by trying to speak, (unless you don't look like them) then they will write down a number on their hand or a piece of paper. You take the pen, mark thru the number and write your own number. Back and forth until you come to agreement. Circle the number and make sure the seller agrees, then you pay and get your item.

Bring a roll of toilet paper with you.

Make sure you have all your shots.

Do not make yourself a target (ie dont wave money, dont wear shirts that say "im a dumb american", don't walk alone down a dark alley at 3am).

Cash (and gold) is king.

Keep a copy of your passport back at the hotel. (some say keep the copy on you and real one at hotel but in a pinch your passport is the most powerful document you will ever touch, read the "to whom it may concern" to understand the power of it).

Do not use your hands to touch food.

If you have a weak stomach I would suggest training yourself by eating raw sushi.

Do not ask what you are eating until after you have had 2 bites.

Most meals are family style, get over it and enjoy the best way to eat.

Hope you like tea. If you pour yourself some make sure to top off your neighbors (don't ask, just do).

Use chop sticks before you go. They will try to offer you a fork behind your back but show your fearless chop stick skills; even if they are bad.

You can STAB and SCOOP with chopsticks, it is kosher I promise.

I was told that using your personal cell phone on China Cell was a bad idea as a non-resident by someone I trust. We bought burners at the market outside the airport.

Obviously bring a camera and take pictures but don't focus on taking pictures.

You drink 1 (maaaaaaaybe) 2 beers and thats it.

A smile is universal.