levi-turner

As a sorta informed outsider, conceptually this makes intuitive sense. But in practice, how does this work? It seems a lot of the intuition breaks down if we don't assume it's network (aka 1 vendor). Fundamentally it's a bunch of external actors where we cannot verify trust and in order to solve for the needs of the individual, suboptimal choices must be made. To put it another way, even if computers can drive cars, what _else_ needs to be in place for this vision?

The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.

Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?

Never worked for either company, but there's a zero percent chance. Legal agrees to bespoke terms and conditions on contracts (or negotiates them) for contracts. How flexible they are to agreeing to exotic terms depends on the dollar value of the contract, but there is no chance that these terms (a) weren't outlined in the contract and (b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal (and ops, doing paybacks in such a manner likely require work-arounds for their ops and finance teams).

Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.

As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.

For background, RFPs are not value neutral. It is not uncommon for customers who have a preferred vendor to shape the RFP to fit in a more natural way to the preferred vendor. To use a simplified example: you want a web server vendor and only IIS and Apache exist. If you have a RFP requirement that the service runs on Linux, then you have a RFP but your requirements have pre-selected the vendor which can achieve the objectives. This is hard to catch from the outside, but focus on ultra specific requirements which seem relatively arbitrary (Linux vs. Windows isn't arbitrary, but the example is super simplified for illustrative purposes).

I am also curious about examples, but as someone from the vendor side, I'll be the first to admit that if the purchasing group has any semblance of intelligence, you can easily hide these biases. The bias only is obvious if you are in the industry and grok the subtle nuances of the capabilities.

Beyond salary, there is a whole industry of data brokers who get transactional data from individual participants in an industry vertical (CPG, Health Insurance, Salary, etc), aggregate it with their competitors and present it back to those participants as benchmarks. Management Consulting likewise is a way to launder getting strategic insight into your competitors from a third-party.

This isn't a Github project with a MIT license. When you do B2B software, there aren't software licenses, there are contractual terms and conditions. The T&Cs outline any number of elements but including SLAs, financial penalties for contractual breaches, etc. Larger customers negotiate these T&Cs line by line. Smaller customers often accept the standard T&Cs.

There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.

Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.

Same at my local Home Depot. Shut down regular registers, self check-out being run as a normal register. Outside of time sensitive shops, I'll go 10 minutes out my way to avoid this.

Let's not use the term "trophy hunting". It's analogous to calling an OBGYN an "abortionist". People hunt for all sorts of reasons. The question is often not whether X number of a particular animal will be killed, the question is who will do the killing. State game quotas are set by biologists who are fine tuning populations. If the animals aren't killed by hunters, they will be killed by State wildlife employees. This process is a core tenant of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Model_of_Wildli... ) which is the reason why there has been a flourishing of game animals in North America in the last century.

But to your point, they are referencing two main funding streams for state fish and game / wildlife / natural resources departments:

1. Pittman-Robertson funds ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Fede... ). The gist is that there's an excise tax on firearms and ammunition. One fun consequence of this is that hunters aren't making up the bulk of funds here, it's recreational shooters. A hunter may shoot 10 shots on a hunting trip. It's gun nuts at firing ranges who disproportionately pay this tax.

2. Sale of hunting and fishing licenses. This varies by state since states' wildlife vary in quantity and quality. Western states with prized large game animals (elk, mountain goats, etc) earn more from this funding stream than Eastern states.

To take an example of Vermont ( https://anr.vermont.gov/sites/anr/files/FY%202023%20ANR%20Bu... ), 36% of funding comes from hunting and fishing licenses and 33% from matching Federal funds. $7.1M of the $9.67M in Federal funding is from Pittman-Robertson ( https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/WR%20Final... ).

The same is true in technical sales. Obviously you need a sufficiently technical background to be able to _do_ stuff, but the primary value you bring is probe further than "we want to do X". The prospect / customer has mayybe done what they are asking twice, you've seen it done 100s of times.

Funnily enough, Disney+ is built by BAMTech who is a spin-off of MLB Advanced Media (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming ).

From someone who does enterprise technical sales for a B2B company: Identity Management is a major area of concern for GCP / GSuite, at least in the enterprise space, especially for the low to moderately technical folks that I sell to. The same could be said for AWS but they have first mover advantage in many ways.

Winner, winner. I am at a competitor of Tableau's, but the point remains the same. One of our favorite quotes was an upper executive at a major technology retailer who told us a version of "it's so cheap to fail with you guys".

There are absolutely needs for engineers who (deeply) understand SQL, can write python code, and can whip up a d3 chart. But that's an expensive project.

There are many, many more individuals in organizations who would make much smarter decisions if they learned a tiny bit of SQL, a basic data warehouse, and were presented with a GUI tool (PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik, etc, etc).

I really think you are narrowly looking at things from near the peak of earning potential and an established career track. That's fine for some and this _is_ a tech oriented site, but still seems rather narrowly focused.

Sample size of 1:

- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress

The massive spike in the value of bitcoin should have set off alarm bells as it was a clear sign of excess money sloshing around in the system chasing returns.

Alternative view as someone who's been following crypto forums over the past few years (and have a _small_ amount of money in various crypto-currencies): The crypto craze during the COVID era has a major undercurrent of pure pessimism / cynicism about the financial prospects for the Millennial+ generations. A very common theme of the interest can be described as effectively a financial YOLO. Many of the posters pretty clearly do not believe that they can prosper in the modern economy if they follow the standard rules. Wages aren't keeping up with inflation of the major assets people require (especially housing, childcare, etc). They see the economy as rigged by the financial elites and crypto as a untapped reserve of economic growth which they can leverage to allow them to have a middle to upper middle class lifestyle they believe that they should have.

For these people, the money they invest in crypto isn't extra money. It's money they _aren't_ investing in savings, in the stock market, etc.

This thread was brought up in a segment on one of the most popular sports podcasts, Pardon My Take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAisGRcTCyY

HackerNews x PMT isn't a cross-over I ever envisioned.

Source for those curious about this: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1222646...

As an example for the detractors, Subaru has disabled components in response to the Massachusetts right to repair law: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/recent-developments-in-the...

I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

I am currently in technical sales (Presales is the name of my org).

This absolutely is not the case. There aren't a ton of folks crossing over but one of my team members did so and has been quite successful.

While it wasn't from a software engineering role, I moved to technical sales from the org's support group so I have the faintest sense of what pitfalls that you may go through.

At the end of the day, many folks in Support groups and R&D groups can fall into the trap of thinking narrowly about a problem. Let us take the problem of getting data into an application. In this scenario a customer asks you if your tool supports 'real time data'. The direct answer is no, it takes time for the tool to fetch / process / present the data from the source system. From a technical lens, this is absolutely, 100% correct. From a selling lens, it's helpful to redirect the conversation towards the customer's goal. Their goal is that they have the lowest latency data possible. This isn't a binary yes / no situation like the previous question.

Now it's relevant to ask questions like:

- What is the source system?

- Is the source truly the originator of the data or is it a downstream consumer of a pipeline?

- If it's not the originator, then how frequently is this pipeline run? Real-time? Micro-batch? What is the latency here?

- Is the source a fixed price system or a cloud-native platform (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, etc) where there are marginal costs per query?

- How many consumers will there be of this data? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Data approaches often can be cost / performance effective at one scale but flounder at another.

The net result is that the key question that you have to ask involves focusing on the _problem_ the potential customer wants to solve, not just the mechanics of how to solve it.

That plus

- the politics of the deal

- answering the question at the right level of grain for an audience (engineers get different frames of the same answer than VPs / Executives)

- positioning your differentiated techniques and technologies early in the deal to nudge out competitors (they will be doing the same)

- explaining broad or complicated techniques in a consumable fashion (aka a ton of PowerPoint slides) and a number of other aspects

Feel free to ping me (email is in my profile) if you want to chat more about this.

A buyer's premium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyer%27s_premium for background, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/the-constitutio... for the details) ? Some quick and dirty maths suggest the final price to be $48,522,000.00

Like librarians

Funny you should mention librarians. It is not uncommon for any role which is titled "librarian" to require a masters of library science / information science. Example job ad: https://workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/default/mdf/recruitment/... *

Other roles are commonly called "Information Specialist" or assorted similar titles (example: https://workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/default/mdf/recruitment/...).

* Picked this library at random. I'd imagine smaller cities are a bit more flexible here, but I'd still take an even money bet that anyone who is under 45 at any library at random with the formal title of "librarian" has a masters degree.

In hip fashion circles, I've seen it crop up regularly. Dadcore, Normcore and the like. I've always taken it to mean the synthesized essence of an aesthetic, or at least the adherents believe that to be the case.

I can't comment on your particular situation, but my partner and I just went through this (closed in May 2021).

Our thought-process was that we would only purchase if we could:

- Plan to live there for 5-10 years

- Plan finances to be able to weather a recession and housing bust within the next 1-3 years (related to the first requirement)

- Plan to live in a place which would have been tolerable Pre-COVID

This is a hard set of requirements for most people but fortunately we are in a good financial situation to be able to meet them.

Pre-COVID: Both of us are remote now (with me having been remote for 3 years prior to COVID). Her commute would not be bad if she had to go to the office. It's not common for technical sales to be in offices, so I am not seriously impacting my career options.

Live there for 5-10 years: We moved back to be near her aging parents. We don't plan on moving _away_ from them and like the area. The area is great for both of our careers and has fantastic schools.

Recession weathering: We had enough available to put down a sizable (50%+) down payment so our monthly mortgage is do-able on 1 income.

The net/net is that I'd hate to be a person who wasn't in a well-paying career who hasn't been fiendishly saving for many years.

For another data point..

Just to collect one random datapoint, do you work for an enterprise-focused tech company?

Yes, B2B company in the enterprise space primarily.

And how much travel do you do outside the pandemic?

My team's role is a bit odd. Think it as a super technical / strategic overlay team. Rather than being assigned to a set of sales reps or to a region, we're attached to the entire US. As a consequence, we're brought in to help with high-end use cases where an individual sales engineer might see the use case once a quarter at max. We also moonlight on strategic discussions around product strategy.

That being said, pre-pandemic, we'd generally travel on-site with customers 5-10 times a year. Travel for more normal sales engineers is a bit more. Maybe, on average, 1.5 full days every 2 weeks. It'll vary by geography. New York / New Jersey focused folks 'travel' more since there's a higher density of customers. For example, pre-pandemic, I traveled down to NY a few hours by train and stopped by 4 customers 6 hours. This is the first software company that I've worked for but based on chatting with departed colleagues, this varies wildly. Some sales reps are, for lack of a better term, abusive of their engineers' time. Think being told on Monday that you need to fly for 3 hours for a meeting on-site on Wednesday with a marginally qualified prospect (aka it's not clear they want our software or have the budget to purchase it).

Feel free to ask if you have other questions.

The parent's point (and one which I agree with) is that the PowerPoint is not the vehicle for details. It's the vehicle for strategy and framing.

Let's take an example. A customer wants to expose my employer's application to external partners / customers / whatever and they need guidance on how to do this. There are a few models on how to do this with positives and negatives:

1. Place a server in a DMZ 2. Reverse Proxy traffic in 3. Have a separate site in a DMZ and programmatically push content there

Sure, I could get on a call and verbally describe those options. But it's infinitely easier to put up a few architecture diagrams which visually depict the options with call outs to considerations with each.

It's fair to ask why can't this be documented in a technical brief / whitepaper / documentation. Well, it is, at least mostly. It's out there. We send links to plenty of documentation. What documentation is extraordinarily bad at is explaining nuance. Best practices are fine, but best practices have a set of assumptions. Those assumptions may be generally true but are entirely simplistic at the margins.

Back to my example. Should we document how the interaction between the DoD's various network segments (think NIPR and SIPR)? Would it shock you that various groups inside of individual branches of the DoD interpret things differently? What about an organization where this use case is the first external exposure of internally deployed software?

Ultimately a good use of the PowerPoint medium is to reduce complexity to the essentials, allow for framing of the underlying issues, and to be used as a pivot to discuss broader strategy. No argument from me that many uses of PowerPoint are laughable. But there's a whole sphere of the technology realm which involve sales, sales adjacent, or strategic discussions where PowerPoint or similar techniques are essential when more formal documentation has not settled things.

I don't disagree to the conclusion but the Sun-Sentinel is owned by the Tribune Publishing Company, which is the third largest newspaper publisher in the US. Often the subsidiaries use the same core CMS / tech. Compare the Sun-Sentinel to another paper owned by Tribune: https://www.pilotonline.com/

It seems a bit odd to not believe there is not only a way to handle this more gracefully but also that Tribune could handle this globally for all of their newspapers.

This is a concept which has rattled around in my brain for a while now and which has come to the fore recently.

At the end of the day, "privilege" as I have seen it used in popular culture is too simplistic. There are many facets to it.

From my life story, I can sketch a portrait which suggests a lack of (many forms of) privilege or the alternative.

Anti-Privilege: I grew up in a rural part of state in the US to parents who by no means were well to-do. While we didn't have noteworthy scarcity, we also didn't have 'nice' things. The cars each parents had were late model at the time. If we took family vacations they were to local destinations. The house I grew up in could probably be purchased for under $70k USD (hard to pin down since it there's no Zillow estimate). Since we weren't rolling in money, I worked a manual labor job at close to full-time during high school.

Pro-Privilege: I didn't want for anything growing up. While we had tame tastes, we could afford the things we needed. We were able to purchase a home computer in the mid-90s. Buying back-to-school clothes was possible, although it wouldn't include anything fancy. Both of my parents, either directly or indirectly through family, owned (small) local businesses. Both parents cultivated a culture of learning in the house, despite neither having done anything more than a few classes at a local community college. Through wise investments, my maternal grandfather was able to help supplement my full-time work to get through state college loan free.

Anti-Privilege: My father passed when I was a young child and my mother needed to support us with Social Security Death Benefit + lower than median wages.

Pro-Privilege: I am white and in generally good health. Due to intrinsic and cultivated habits and capabilities, I have been able to build a well paying career in a relatively stable profession (tech, broadly construed).

Anti-Privilege: I did go through 6-8 years of being clinically depressed during my teenage - young adult years.

The net/net:

- Race: Privileged. Whites are privileged in the US. I could be worse off here.

- Class: Unprivileged. I would peg myself as around median for the US, or maybe slightly below growing up.

- Economics: On the margin but probably unprivileged. I was raised in a high working / low middle class, it could be worse. There are elements of privilege. I could be worse off here, but I'd guesstimate that it's below median.

- Health: About median by any definition, but could definitely be worse off here so let's call it privileged.

- Mental capabilities: Definitely privileged. Honors / AP classes in (an admittedly crappy) public school. A university that most have heard of, although still a state school. Elements could have been better but overall, the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance style thought experiment would net out that I am above median here.

- Generational: Privileged. I grew up during a boom time for the US (90s). I attended college from 2003-2007 so just at the beginning of the rapid inflation of the price for a degree. I graduated in 2007 which was certainly a much better time to graduate than the following year.

There are a bunch of pro-privilege assessments here but it seems incredibly weird to me to envision the life I've lived as being 'privileged'. But that's ultimately how privilege works, an unearned credit which silently lifts your prospects and buffers you from random chance decimating your chance at living a fulfilling life.

My memory from some introductory classes in African Studies from the mid-aughts has any relevancy here. The standard narrative at the time was that the Colonial investments in Africa, as a rule, involved building infrastructure to connect the interiors to the cost in the colony. The consequence of this is that post-colonial economies do not get to leverage this investment for inter-country trade. Imagine trade from Chicago to New York _requiring_ routing through the Mississippi up the coast to the port of New York. From a cursory look over the waterways of Africa, I am seeing similar features (interior > coast without much cross country coverage). At the end of the day we're all outsiders to this field, but I do wonder whether focusing on the presence / length without the connectivity overlay is missing a key component.