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The Google Caste System
managedcode writes "Google doesn't like to do things traditionally. Right from their IPO, when they dumped Goldman Sachs for secretly trying to deal with their big investor, Kleiner Perkins. Business Week covers the Google Caste System, 'in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys [..] They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.' At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
This is sure to get you all hard. And then you'll go back to work monday and chain yourself to your desk for 8 hours.
Importance doesn't equal control in much respect. The executives and managers are still in control of the company's future, regardless of what the programmers, DB admins, and the like want to believe. Don't get me wrong, this is great for the company, and is theorhetically the best way to work it. If your workforce is happy, they are more productive and do better quality work. Quality work and productivity really make or break a company. Thus, if you motivate them and reward them to make them happy, the company will do well.
" At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
this reminds me of when steve balmer made his famous developers speech... "developers developers developers developers..."
will start to realise it's the employees that make their company work, not just the sales people!
http://www.gibby.net.au
Well, Google is still young. I'm fairly sure it will eventually enter middle age and the engineers will be replaced by marketing. Then when it gets old, the marketeers will be replaced by lawyers. It is just a question of time, years, or even decades.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Google is still young. Eventually the business types, who have spent their lives studying how to manipulate people, will slowly take control from the folks who have spent their lives studying how to manipulate computers.
So if the Google "Caste System" is exceptional in that it promotes software developers over others in the corporation, what does that say about the "caste" rankings in most companies? Or do we only start seeing phrases like "caste system" when big media companies feel threatened by successful businesses using disruptive methods?
This rather reminds me of Wall Street's desperate attempts to declare the Google auction IPO a failure, even after Google got more than twice the dollars per share than they would have in an investment bank-priced IPO. If you can't beat them, have your puppet press hang an ugly label on them.
Remain calm! All is well!
I hope this finally changes attitudes of business leaders. I've been working in software business for a decade now and never have I seen a software company where experts were valued above salesmen. When a salesman makes a big contract, it's like he is the king of the world. Whole company has to kneel before him (just a metaphor). When there are lay offs, the salesmen are last to go. But what we all slashdotters know and Google has now implemented, is that a deal with a customer is just a materialization of work done by the whole workforce of a company. It's not the moment when the contract is signed, that customer decides to order. It's the whole run where project managers convince the customer with a well done project, coders produce a product which customer loves, and other project people spend long hours with the customer assuring him that we really care for him. In the end, salesman is just there to present the work done by others.
Many business leaders have began to realize, that people aren't using Google's product because they're running nice commercials on TV, but because they're just good products. It's no wonder why there have been so much polemic about bad quality of software products. Atleast where I've worked, all products have been done with a minimum effort. When a first alpha version start to emerge, business leader have already arranged massive demonstration events to customers. Focus from finishing the product shifts to making a good demonstration. Google makes a difference here. Unlike its competitors (like Micro$oft), its products actually work and what I've said many times to myself, a good product sells itself.
I hope those investors (in the article), that are looking for companies to fill up market gaps left by Google, understand it's not the market gap people are willing to buy. People are looking for good products that also might fill up a market gap in the process.
Engineering driven companies are nothing new, they're just normally not sustainable.
Semiconductor and Passives components manufacturing are normally:
a. small and founded by a geek with a good idea, who either...
1. sells out early OR
2. tries to make a go of it, spends too much time on pet projects and runs the company down.
b. large companies driven by suits who:
1. understand non-R&D business, ie. Sales and Operations, and remain competitive AND
2. acquire small companies run into the ground by geeks.
Why does Google do so well run by geeks? Dunno. It's astonishing they stay so focused. Guessing, maybe it's fear -- seems like they want to win so badly.
But right now every 'free' thing they do, from maps to mail, pumps the very serious ad business with eyeballs and press.
Think of a newspaper. The people who sell ad space and work in Classifieds are secondary to the reporters and editors who manage what stories go into the paper and the general political tone and direction. In fact, those sales people are generally looked down-upon as a necessary evil.
Think about TV. Who runs things, the people selling air time for commercials or the station manager who chooses what shows appear and what the format is when the network isn't forcing its agenda? Or even at network level, what directs them - people who sell ads or creative people who think their program could be a hit?
Radio is the same. Google's business model is: Sell non-obtrusive ads associated with information services. To do this, they need compelling services to make people get ads on the same web page. These services are like shows on TV or juicy news articles - they drive eyeballs, which allows for ad revenue.
Really, there is no other way to run it and make money.
...and she doesn't own a computer, let alone have the faintest idea of how to use one. Google is this millennium's Ford Motor Company. Ford started the assembly line and all the other automakers followed suit. Google values what they consider their most valuable assets and reward them well for their efforts.
Another example; I was explaining Picasa to someone who was looking for a way to easily email photos who wasn't the most computer savvy of all people. She was leery about trying a new piece of software until she found out it's a Google product. She was all for it after that. In a lot of people's minds, Google == Quality. I am not saying it's right, but perception rules the world.
As a programmer, obviously I think its cool that engineers & techies who work on the product are valued at the same level (or above) the corporate company structure. I just don't see how this is so different from what has been going on at other tech companies, for instance Microsoft, where people have always been able to choose between moving up the management ladder or move up the food chain as an Independant Contributor. A lot of the Distinguished Engineers and Technical Fellows at Microsoft and specifically in MSR (and I'm sure the same is true of a lot of other companies) are really just engineers with no direct reports, and they are clearly esteemed and thought of as highly as anyone in the company.
I agree its cool, I'm just not so sold that its a new idea that applies only to Google.
How can you believe that hackers arent experts in social engineering? Theres a reason why hackers like Bill Gates and the Google founders get rich. It's because manipulating people is not something that only elite businessmen can do, anyone can do it with enough practice.
Also, what makes you think Google would hire manipulators or people who seem like a threat? And if they did don't you think they have security mechanisms in place? You make it seem as if its as simple as someone just walking in and hiijacking the company, its not easy to do a hostile take over of a corporation with an educated workforce.
Lets look at the politics here for a moment, if you dare try to mess with Google, and you ever looked up anything on their search engine such as porn and anything private, they'll have so much political dirt on you that they'll have all the information they need to shut you up, or blackmail you, your bosses, etc.
It's generally very difficult to hiijack data mining companies, because these companies know way more about the people who they hire than whats in the resume.
Add to that picture all the horribly programmed engineering tools we have to use (and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for), with GUIs that were created by retarded lemurs on acid, and, well, my opinion of the current state of the science of programming is not very healthy. Nice to see someone out there is taking some initiative.
Seriously, when a Mac head like me favors using your tool via the command line and C shell scripts, you need to *FIRE* whomever it is that designs your GUIs.
Oh, and X Windows programmers? The text that's highlighted? That's what I expect to be replaced by my typing. It's not meant for the random decoration that you all use it for.
Well, he convinced me that it was a two way street. That there is no shortage of good ideas and products out there, and the ONLY reason some succeed over others is becuase people like him and Sales people make it happen. They sell products that they know aren't quite ready yet (vaporware) because the company needs the revenue. They sell products that they know are inferior to the competition because their Scientists and Engineers made a stupid mistake early on in the product development lifecycle that didn't get caught until too late and the company can't afford to start over.
Basically he convinced me (a seasoned Engineer) that we need them as much as they need us.
So, be careful in your thinking about this issue.
There have been companies like this in the past. It will change, just give it time. 10 years from now engineers will be treated the same as anywhere else ;)
"At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
Any company that gives too much weight to marketing and accounting types eventually runs things into the ditch of bad products...wrong thing - wrong way.
This is a leason that has been learned many times over, by many companies. Google is hardly the first to demonstrate the discipline to stick to it.
Chrysler supposedly learned this lesson the hard way in the 70's & 80's, when bean counters were allowed to decide which models cars and trucks would go to market. The company paid dearly for that mistake, and is only now comng off the ugly results.
Just remember that the group most capable to 'get it right' (right thing - right way) includes design engineers, usability engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers, as well as project managers, tech writers and testing types.
Find good ones and give them the tools they need and get out of their way. You'll be a hero without even trying.
Also, you might be interested to know Goldman Sachs' origins basically lie in the fact that Jews were so marginalized in 19th-century New York finance (J.P. Morgan et al., all the other banks, would only take them as clients) that Marcus Goldman's firm was pretty much the only place bankers could prosper if they had the misfortune of being from the "wrong" background. Even then, Jewish bankers were shut out of almost all but the most menial duties of the financial world. Or... you might not have been interested to know that.
joking aside, the phenomenon can be found in nearly every tech/engineering company in the whole wide world where the founders are engineers, still run the place and the company or industry has high growth rates. The suits only ever come in when growth is slowing down and the products don't sell by itself but need the help of the big, bad BS-marketing machine. Oh, by the way, I used to be a suit myself , with hundreds of engineers working for me, despite me mostly not having a clue what they were doing. It worked pretty well, mostly. The reason: Making business decisions and knowing the financials. Or to turn it around: To not get the suits into the door, get used to love making decisions and get a grasp of accounting. Then happy days. It is not that hard, actually it is bloody easy.
I think its also a good idea if engineers get a taste of business and business people get a taste of engineering. I remember when I was the stuck-up student who believed he was the engineer of all things. I thought that users should bloody well learn to use a system correctly not the other way round. I thought that a properly engineered system was the way to go and that just making a product work so it could be sold was some kind of sin. I swore blindly to upholding standards at all costs and I wasted months trying to plan projects before I started doing anything. Back then I would look down on people because perhaps they used Flash, named a variable 'temp', used the wrong colour wires or used lossy compression in any way. Maybe I was worse than most I don't know, but someone like that doesn't work well in any kind of commercial industry, from arts to engineering, in the real world people want things that work or look good and they want them tomorrow. I only learnt that from experience and I think business people could probably learn a thing or two from the other side of the fence. Both sides are always gunning at each other because they don't understand each others issues and aspirations. Managers are always asking engineers to do something seemingly insane, engineers are always stressing that they need more time and that their system must be perfect or else it will be the end of the world.
Just to clear things up:
- Users don't need big colourful buttons to be able to figure out how something works, this does not automatically create an intuitive interface. It does however satisfy specifications and make it look like you care, if that's all that matters to you.
- Every product on the market, from TV's to computers to cars, have numerous hacks and last minute workarounds in them, they won't be a perfect system and they will have bugs or defects. you're product _will_ be the same.
- Every market has 3 products: the best, the cheapest, and the one with most value for money. While technically all other competing products are useless and not even worth assembling, that won't stop you being able to flog them to people if yours doesn't happen to fit into one of those 3 categories.
- There are two types of people: those who work 9-5, satisfy specifications and instructions *technically* and deliver on time, and those who work all the time, ignore specifications and go out of their way to make things actually work properly even if the original plan was flawed (as it usually is).
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Article written by marketoids without understanding of the real value of Google...
Some bloppers:
That's not to say Google could afford to go out and do a big deal just for the sake of it. A mega-takeover potentially could wreak havoc on Google. Even Piper Jaffray Co's. (PJC ) 11/18/05 @ 9:05 PM --] Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy, one of Wall Street's biggest Google bulls, says: "If they were to buy AOL or eBay, it would hurt the stock."
Google buying one of the Evil Giants would certainly hurt the stock, by damaging reputation of Google. People hate AOL and at least mildly dislike eBay. Loss of capital by Google has nothing to do with it. Loss of trust does.
All the same, the lure of a big deal could prove hard to resist, particularly if Google's strategic position is threatened. For the past two months, Google has been battling Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) at the bargaining table for a stake in Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX ) AOL unit
Whoa, Google lost such a deal to Microsoft, such a big battle, such juicy morsel...? No. Google was acting as a shill, for its own interest. Bloat the price of a mostly worthless piece of junk, make the competition offer way more than they would offer initially, and then let them have the rotten carcass for price of luxury dish.
Losing some battles gives more profit than winning them.
Young Googlers' preoccupation with these perks tend to drive mature VCs to distraction. "If I hear one more [punk] complain about his omelet, or tell me he's bored with the smoothie selection, I'm gonna, I don't know," splutters one.
What would YOU prefer to do? Make the job fun and it will be efficient. Not in terms "lines of code per day" but in terms "satisfied customers per day". Still hard to get for some.
Says the aggrieved VC: "Did it ever occur to them that this was like asking us to do their homework for them? It's the height of arrogance."
It's lots of VCs who hope to make a lot of money on that. Google just does the usual thing, and is only one. So, usual marketing rule, if the sales outweight demand, sellers must look for ways to attract the customer and the customer may afford demanding much more for the same price. I thought these guys are businessmen? You don't want to do the homework for Google? Someone else will, and they will get the candy, not you, mr Very Senior Partner.
The suits inside Google don't fare much better than the outside pros. Several current and former insiders say there's a caste system, in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys.
As opposed to the caste system where the business types rule the second-class "production crew".
They argue that it could prove to be a big challenge in the future as Google seeks to maintain its growth. They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.
I think they just misunderstand "corporate development". Google took this term right. Marketoids still think it means themselves.
The candidate, a Wall Street tech M&A specialist who was looking for a change of scenery and a more relaxed lifestyle, calls the experience "chaotic, bureaucratic, and very rigid." Strung out over more than nine months and numerous coast-to-coast flights, the courtship culminated in a jarring "pop quiz."
Drummond rejects the accusations that Google is anti-businesspeople. He says Google has hired many MBAs and bankers and is constantly assessing its dealmaking strategy.
Google is just anti-assholepeople. Jerks who hope to get cash from the suckers. And they get punished pretty cruelly for attempts to pick on Google.
What's more relaxing for the coders crew than to see a super-important suit, a stockmarket shark to jump through loops and sweat heavily just to get a candy they wave in front of his nose? Less bull from your side and deals with Google would become pleas
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I think you are falling prey to the media hype.
America caste system is more based on money than color. True there are always exceptions to these social structures and always will be, but the decision to include or exclude someone is done more on the basis of financial standing and potention to improve my financial standing than color.
If we're bringing out Constitutions in this regard, then we're pretty much on par; our Constitution, taking liberal inspiration from yours I must add, also declares that all Indians are equal.
More than mere navel gazing.
This is funny and confirms some of my original suspicions.
Previously my company tried to purchase and use a google search engine box. However if you try and buy the google box for your corporate searching needs you will find it impossible to deal with their sales people. They don't offer support, they won't tell you anything. Funnily enough technically if you want to make it work its a doodle.
Google needs to improve its sales drastically if its honestly going to take over the world, technology just is not enough.
People hate Microsoft for being more of a marketing than a technical company, and it is in part because techies could have better jobs elsewhere producing quality work, if it weren't for the Marketing behemoth.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Good point - what many people fail to realize is that the engineers and sales people are a team - without each other a company won't succeed. Engineers need to develop good products and sales peopel need to create cash flow to keep the development pipeline funded. I've done both, and both jobs have their unique challenges.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Because it's common knowledge that Google's portfolio is impressive, and so his post is "redundant" as it conveys no new information or insight. The whole "How can the first post possibly be redundant?!" schtick is an annoyingly common and utterly bizarre fallacy.
I am sure you are right, because I have seen it happen. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was founded in 1959 by a couple of engineers. When I became aware of the company in 1963 it still had an engineering culture: the engineers ran the show, and the sales people were secondary. Somewhere around 1968, they renamed the programmers "software engineers" to give them more prestige.
As the company matured the culture changed. Even though I worked for DEC from 1975 to 1992, I cannot point to a specific event that was the watershed. The first symptom that I noticed was that the KS10 was said to be developed in secret to prevent it from being cancelled. Even if that wasn't true, the fact that engineers believed it indicates that the engineers no longer felt that they were making the decisions.
I wonder if paying commissions to the sales people was a symptom or a cause.
I don't blame the demise of Digital entirely on the shift from an engineering focus to a sales focus. There were some bad decisions made by engineering in the last few years. But I can't help wondering if those decisions might have been corrected more quickly by a younger company.
Strangely, IBM appears to be a counter-example. They are by far the oldest computer company, but they seem to have achieved some sort of dynamic equilibrium, where they are able to change direction as technology and markets change quickly enough to survive. I am sure some of that has to do with their size, but as General Motors reminds us, size is no guarantee of survival. I suppose they have internal institutions that keep them nimble.
There are some good books on Digital Equipment Corporation. See The Ultimate Entrepreneur for the story of DEC at its height, and DEC is Dead Long, Live DEC for a look back after its death.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Why do you consider it a moral issue to sell stuff to people? Have you ever considered that you may just have a mental illness? You can be honest and sell people stuff you know. It is very possible. The distrust of all things commercial isn't cool anymore. Its an indication of a fucked up mind in my book.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Both extremes are short sighted.
Microsoft has ossified because engineers, creativity, and innovation don't carry enough clout.
On the side, Apple is a second rate power in the I.T. world. They could be dominating the I.T. world like Microsoft now does, if not for the poor business decision they made when they got started of pricing their computers above IBM's crappy PCs. Giving more clout to smart business men at that time could have changed things.
A successful tech company needs to both the businessmen and the engineers sufficently empowered.
It seems Google has learned its lessons from Microsoft. Lets see if they also learn Apple's. More importantly, lets see if they remember both lessons as they expand and get big.
> The executives and managers are still in control of the company's future,
> regardless of what the programmers, DB admins, and the like want to believe.
Your statement assumes some sort of line between non-engineer execs and non-exec engineers. But there *are* no non-engineer execs. Heck, as far as I can tell, there aren't even any non-engineers PMs! Know why that is?
The exec team spends a fair amount of time thinking about, "how can we lose this" / "how does this all go wrong"? One example they cite is Apple, which was great, lost it, and is only recently getting great again... and one big problem they point out is that for a while Apple had no engineers at board level! (Remember when Sally Ride was on the board of directors at Apple??)
The lesson is clear: when you have engineers everywhere, no one at the bottom or mid level can pull the wool over your eyes. The moment you start saying "A good manager doesn't have to be an engineer", you forget that a non-engineer manager can be fooled by an incompetent engineer who "manages up well", and then things start to sink.
The troika that rules Google, Sergey, Larry, Eric: they can all code. If that over stops being the case, that's probably an early signal to sell the stock!
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
Your missing the whole point.
The business method behind Google is that the engineers will create products that will be innovative and good enough that they will stand out above the crowd and be noticed. It should not require a sales team hounding you and taking your CFO out to dinner to make the sale. In many ways, HP and DEC used to be like that.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I believe the idea is that the tech people have a certain veto power over the suits. How this can be a bad thing, I'll never know.
Are you serious?
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
Look, there are a lot of dumb "suits" out there. But - at least in theory - if your company has any brains then these "suits" are where they are because they understand what decisions need to be made in order to grow the business and/or keep it running. Giving engineers "veto power" is bad because they frequently use it to promote nifty nerd things that are not actually helpful to the business. A healthy partnership between producers and managers is needed in any good company ... but don't say you can't see how giving engineers final say could be a bad thing!
"95% of all Slashdot
I do and so should everyone else. If the company want you to work 50-60-70 or more hours a week, the company is mismanaged and it's time to get out!. I have never had a job that requires me to work more than 40 hours.
To quote an old movie, Auntie Mame from 1958: "Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!" If you work 50-60-70 hours a week, you are starving to death! Do you really want to look back on your life and say "Geeez.... What happened? I was at work!" Not me, no thank you very much!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Engineers don't need more clout than salespeople, anymore than salespeople shouldn't get more clout than engineers. To have a company that really, really shines, you need the best of both.
The funny thing about mediocre sales people is that they see mediocre engineers, and don't understand what the big deal is. Meanwhile, the mediocre engineer sees the mediocre sales guy, and *also* doesn't understand the big deal.
Meanwhile, the talented engineers and sales people look at the other side and know that they couldn't do that job nearly as well as the person they are looking at.
The companies that are currently ridiculously succesful are the ones that recognize that employees are their greatest asset.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
How many companies have lost their strategic edge by placing more emphasis on "business" rather than engineering.
Intel - the king of silicon - once an engineering powerhouse, is losing its edge in the CPU business - why? By putting marketing ahead of engineering talent, it designed an architecture that would sell well based on GHz ratings. Now, the corporate market (the most profitable market for CPUs) is taking a hard look at opteron. Why? It's a better performing design with less power consumption than Intel's offerings. The day Dell starts selling 2 CPU opteron boxes is the day Intel starts regretting the GHz marketing decision.
HP - once run by engineers that flew coach instead of by private Lear jet. HP used to be the king of "technology must-haves" from medical equipment, to scientific and engineering tools. HP was the standard in many industries. Thanks to Carly and most of her management staff they decided to exit those niche (but highly profitable) markets for what???? The PC business? God - if that isn't a marketing driven decision, I don't know what is.
SGI - don't even get me started about this shell of a company. This company had some pretty impressive hardware and 3D rendering products that were way ahead of everyone else in the industry. This was another company that decided selling Windows boxes was the way to go.
You can always count on non-technical managers to screw up these types of companies. They don't understand the high-end niche technologies, so they focus on stuff they do understand - the commodity garbage you can purchase at Best Buy.
Let Engineers run tech companies - the money and success will follow.
-ted
First, it's something for the CEO to do. Really. Acquisitions are something the CEO can actually do. If the CEO has a financial or legal background, acquisitions are something they understand. On the operational side, the CEO of a large company mostly has to just pick people and give them general direction. There are exceptions to this, but they're rare. If you can't fix the company you're running, acquisition gives the illusion you're doing something.
Second, acquisitions are highly visible events for a CEO. They get you on the cover of Business Week. You can talk to other CEOs about them. You get better golf dates. Improving manufacturing productivity by 15% doesn't do this, even though it might triple profits.
Third, acquisitions usually result in increased CEO income. The company is bigger now, so the CEO should make more. Right? Don't underestimate this. Also, acquisitions tend to increase stock volatility, and if much of your pay is in options, volatility pays off, even if, on average, the trend is neutral or even down.
Now, it can actually make sense to acquire a company for its technology or its market share. In the first case, the acquired company is usually small, and you're buying technology, not a customer base or manufacturing capability. A successful example is Google buying Keyhole. Keyhole was small, had good technical assets, and wasn't too expensive. An unsuccessful example is SGI buying Cray. Cray had a large mainframe manufacturing operation and too many people, neither of which SGI needed. (SGI comes to mind because I was in a building yesterday I'd previously visited when SGI owned it. They don't own it any more.)
Buying market share makes sense if you buy something in the same business. You're reducing competition and can raise prices. You might even get economies of scale. Blockbuster, which bought out many other video store chains, is a successful example.
On the other hand, buying companies for "diversification" or to "expand into a new business area" usually doesn't work out too well. Buying for vertical integration, where you buy your supplier or customer, used to be popular half a century ago, but is now somewhat out of favor. It made sense to buy a coal mine when you had a steel mill. It make less sense to buy an ISP when you're a phone company.
I've watched these behaviors for years. See Downside's Deathwatch for the results. (When it says "Chart not available for this symbol, it's not because there's a bug. It's because the company died.)
"They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers."
Well then, maybe that's why none of their products seem to support any common goal (besides being 'cool'). It often seems like Google's left and right hands are completely unaware of each other, and that could be due to teams of gifted engineers all cranking away without ever taking the time to talk to other teams and figure out what the hell the company is doing.
Engineers are important, but alone they're not sufficient to build a viable company.
Why do you think "'New York' bankers" means "Jews"? And why should we care? My take is that you should think more and look for "code words" less.
Bull, greenrd. I really hate how a rational discussion of the social status of bankers got disrupted by a wild-eyed accusation of anti-semitism.
Yes, PARC was a great success in every way, and made fortunes for everybody but Xerox.
So Xerox didn't know how to capitalize on what PARC made - how is that PARC's fault?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Trust me, the VCs will not care that you put in 100 hours a week when they zero out your stock options and trade the company to thier buddies. Get defered compensation for the extra hours or forget about it.
I personally have no problem with the realization that engineers and sales people should work as a team; it just makes sense to reap the rewards of specialization.
What I do have a problem with is when sales people decide that engineers are not teammates, but their personal slaves.
I certainly don't mind when a salesman more or less sells my work and/or skills -- that's what he's supposed to do, and it's also what I'm paid for anyway. What I do mind, however, is when a salesman sells my work and/or skills at a price considerably below the cost to the company, and promise a date that is several times sooner than is is possible if I were to work continually (and somehow without losing effectiveness without rest and/or sleep). It doesn't so much hurt my pride that the salesman thinks what I do is worth that little; I got past that fact before I started college.
What bothers me is that, in the back of my head, I know two things:
1.) My company is taking a loss on the transaction; the corporate accountants lament this frequently. It sucks having to prove to the accountants that the salesman sold a product whose base cost (to us) is $40k. Add in one-off engineering that costed us $100k to develop. Now look at what he sold the entire package for: $50k. If the engineering cost nothing, we would have made $10k. But the engineering costs were $100k. So to make $10k on the sale, the salesman should have sold it for $150k, not $50k. Do the math. This hurts my confidence in the company (and hence my job) existing in the future. I've got bills to pay and lack enough experience to get another job anytime soon.
2.) Usually I already have a development schedule I have to keep. Inevitably, a salesman makes a promise he shouldn't have, comes to engineering, demanding at the top of his lungs that everybody drop what they're doing and fix the mess he just whipped up for us. Other than problem #1, my problem with it is that by doing so, the project I'm supposed to be developing is forcibly set aside. This would also be fine, if my development schedule were adjusted for the weeks it took me to pander to his needs; except this doesn't happen. As a result, I'm about eight months behind schedule; I figure I'll get about two weeks in before I have another fire drill to take care of for sales.
Even then I wouldn't mind much about the salesman making promises of solutions that he knows don't exist -- except the salesman doesn't even know he's stretching the truth. It's so bad that the company holds little training sessions for them over lunch so they know what it is they are selling, the next is to tell them what our products are used for.
What kind of a salesman
a.) literally doesn't know what he's selling
b.) doesn't know, even in the most simple sense, what the product does.
It's literally like a car salesman who doesn't know what a car is, or what a buyer would do with the car after buying it.
The best product is rarely the most popular - the most popular is always the one with the best sales and marketing people.
While that is somewhat true, Google seems to be the exception to that rule.
Google hardly does any advertising or pushy sales - it has got where it is because of the quality of what they offer. I was a huge AltaVista fan and I moved to Google only because of how well it worked, no other reason needed.
Now what Google does very well at is marketing, which to my mind is bigger than sales. But the way they have been successful is to bake a little bit of marketing know-how into the culture which is then infused through products. It seems to be working really well so far.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley