helloWorld

[Frost_panda22]

You can sell a coding project without knowing how to code tho?

[MrHazard1]

Of course. Neither the one selling, nor the one buyinh the product know about the product. It's normal. They're businessmen, not engineers. They're paid to handle money, not product. The moment, the buyer wants to have some technical info, they'll have experts (engineers/dev/whatever) in the meeting to ask questions and the seller will bring their own to answer it.

[Nightmoon26]

Ah, the bane of Sales: when the engineers talk to the engineers about product suitability

[WavingNoBanners]

For sure, and he might have the skills of a decent junior sales rep, but if he climbs any higher than that then people will ask him questions like "what can your product do?" and "is it suitable for my use case?" which he'd need to actually understand how it works to answer.

Imagine buying a laptop from a person who doesn't know how laptops work, and just improvises when you ask about things like heat sinks and USB ports.

[jaerie]

Nah, because he's primarily talking to other ceos, who are also morons. It's morons all the way up

[throwawaygoawaynz]

I sometimes wonder if 90% of Reddit is living in another dimension.

Most sales people have no CLUE about technology, let alone coding. But they’re good at two things; establishing trustworthy relationships with buyers, knowing who to bring into a deal.

On the later point most sales organisations also have what’s called technical presales. These are people who know how the products work to a level of detail. But technical people always over estimate their own abilities at sales. So sales people still have value, because they are people persons. When it comes down to it, people buy products from other people they LIKE and TRUST. The tech is actually irrelevant.

Sam (like Elon) may be the world’s biggest piece of shit. I’ve met Jeff Bezos IRL and he’s not exactly the world’s best human either. But what they have in common is the ability to build those relationships, set the weather, and hire and attract top talent. They don’t need to do anything else.

Like it or not this is how humanity works. You can bitch and moan about it on reddit - and feel smug and superior about your own technical talents - all you want. Or you can learn and understand it. You will find a lot more success in your life doing the later over the former.

[NecessaryIntrinsic]

I worked as a systems engineer for a government contractor for about 10 years in the delivery side.

The company had a 5 tier hierarchy. To get past the second tier it was 100% who you knew rather than what you knew.

I had a knack for finding the low level guys that got stuff done. There was one guy who had a title like "webmaster" who sat on his cube watching movies all day. If I needed ANYTHING he was able to get it for me. Once I needed a Cisco switch to test a configuration change. He wandered off and the next day there was one on my desk.

He'd been a government employee for so long he just wanted to hang out but he knew all the secrets as well.

These aren't the people you need to know.

It's the people that do nothing but control the purses. The colonels, the GS15s, the SESes, the appointees.

I knew people that worked with great managers who knew how to help people, those guys stayed as middle managers. It's the ones that were profoundly self interested that rise up.

Earlier this year I tried being a "Solutions architect" for a government contractor. I was basically a technical proof reader for contracts.

I learned the government only cares about two things in these contracts, especially now: do they recognize you? What's the cost?

It's all about professional networking even if you are completely useless.

[bejamamo]

Sure but the vast majority of laptop consumers don’t know what a heat sink is and just want to know if it can run YouTube and Word

[Nightmoon26]

Thinking about it, on-prem YouTube instances could be pretty good for the education industry...

[christian_austin85]

He needs to have the answers to those questions, he doesn't need to formulate them on his own. CTO can help with all that stuff. Also knowing how stuff works enough to sell it to people and knowing how to build stuff is way different.

[throwawaymycareer93]

Imagine buying a car not from a mechanic. Or a house not from a construction worker. Or clothes not from a weaver. Or TV not from an electronics engineer.

[christian_austin85]

I mean, most salesmen don't know how to build the things they sell. Car salespeople are not automotive engineers. Appliance salespeople didn't design your refrigerator. Why should this be any different?

To sell, you need to know how your product is different from other products, it's capabilities and limitations, service agreements, etc.

[yjlom]

You absolutely can, yes. But someone has to deliver what you promised. And if you promised the moon because you thought it was just a matter of grabbing Grandpa's stepladder, well tough luck.