The Bosses Do Everything Better (or So They Think) 469
theodp writes "Some people, writes Dave Winer, make the mistake of thinking that if the result of someone's work is easy to use, the work itself must be easy. Like the boss — or boss's boss's boss — who asks for your code so he can show you how to implement the features he wants instead of having to bother to explain things. Give the code to him, advises Winer. If he pulls it off, even poorly, at least you'll know what he was asking for. And if he fails, well, he might be more patient about explaining what exactly he wants, and perhaps even appreciate how hard your work is. Or — more likely — you may simply never hear from him again. Win-win-win. So, how do you handle an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better boss?"
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you really have a thing for sales and marketing, don't you?
Personally I have plenty of social skills (although this may not be evident when I'm ranting on Slashdot) but I've also seen enough of the insides of sales and marketing departments to know I would never want to do that job. Even as a developer I've had to implement various schemes by these people and no matter how many times they smile like used car salesmen and repeat the "Oh, it's not lying or making them want something they don't need, we're simply making them understand that they needed something they didn't know they needed" mantra I can't shake the feeling that they're basically making a living preying on others.
I simply find both sales and marketing immoral (at least in the forms they commonly have in our society).
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:3, Insightful)
At the previous company I worked for I was the IT department. There were ~25 employees at the office and 10 shops with another 20 employees. There was more than average maintenance required for the equipment also, because of several reasons. One of them being that everything was poorly setup to begin with. I didn't even have the time to properly fix the setups (yes, multiple horribly setup systems) and I was already working overtime - unpaid.
The marketing manager was a girl with mediocre skills, you can probably guess why she got that position. Some of the other managers were actually up to scratch, but not all. On top of that, they were paid at least 3 times my salary.
This is about just one employee and one company, but I'm sure there are too many people out there who've had similar experiences.
really? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Give the code to him, advises Winer.
I recall a more general advice from the series: don't upset people serving your food.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is also why I don't understand why programmers and IT usually put down other departments like sales and marketing. Maybe because they don't understand that it is actually hard work, and requires learning just like you do with programming books. Yes, some people will be good at it naturally, but majority aren't. It's the same with programmers and pretty much anything. The fact is, sales and marketing is hard work. It's especially hard to do it correctly, as it's usually the sales and marketing people that are responsible for the product gaining any users.
My personal experience and that of others I have talked to suggests that IT people, being particularly rooted in facts and logic, have little respect for people who routinely dance around pulling promises out of their backsides about products they don't understand and then expect the coders to just "sort it out" because the marketoids think they are the only ones bringing money into the business. It's also the same marketoids that get bonuses for sales that wouldn't have been possible if the coders hadn't put in huge amounts of unpaid overtime modifying production code to include ( non existent) features that the marketoids promised the customer without consulting the production team first. Sales and Marketing deserve respect? When they learn to SHOW some respect and act like team players THEN they might deserve something other than justified contempt.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
I simply find both sales and marketing immoral (at least in the forms they commonly have in our society).
Sales and marketing is mostly finding out what a person needs, why he needs that and how they can help the person with it. It's also making it easier for customers to buy your services or products, and letting them know such product exists (to fix a need, again). What is so immoral about that?
I've stumbled upon many programmers who are trying to sell their products to customers but they lack total understanding of it. They want to spend time with the product, and almost loathe customers (which is shared feeling between lots of geeks and programmers). But you can't run a business like that. You need someone to take care of the customers and researching what their product can fix. "Here is the thing, maybe it does something for you" isn't really good selling point. You need to figure out and tell the customer what he would gain by buying your product or service, from the customers point of view.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
Well at some point when you have a product you want to make it known to people that it exists. Whether you force it down peoples throat or remain with the facts is a question of style.
So here you don't answer the question of whether marketing/sales is an important/necessary/hard job to do -- You don't like a common style of doing it.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is also why I don't understand why programmers and IT usually put down other departments like sales and marketing. Maybe because they don't understand that it is actually hard work, and requires learning just like you do with programming books.
It's not because the sales and marketing people suck at sales and marketing and engineers think they can do it better. It's because the sales and marketing people promise features to the customers before they've even been proposed to engineering. Or they will demand some ridiculous feature ONLY because a competitor product has it. The fact that the feature is stupid or takes resources away from implementing real features that would add value is irrelevant to them.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Experienced programmers lose that attitude about the value of other employee's work in a company. Sure some of us laugh at the stupid shit marketing comes up with, but we also know they're just doing their job. We keep complaining about management, but we learn to speak their language and explain things in their terms if we want to succeed. Only arrogant fools keep thinking they're superior to everyone else.
And how could it be otherwise?
After you've spent a few years making mistakes and correcting bugs in your code, you either lose the ego that you're infallible, or you drown in a sea of egotistical misery.
When a bug report is filed, the experienced programmer thinks "Oh shit. What did I miss."
The junior programmer thinks "Damn users. Always complaining. They don't know how anything works."
Nothing but experience can burn the ego out of a programmer. And either it gets burned out of your system, or you get frustrated enough to quit the industry.
Re:And of course the user is never a whiney bitch (Score:5, Insightful)
The bug reporter said it himself:
Note: There was no option under Template to set this as a feature instead of a defect report.
So why would the programmer inform the user of what he already knew?
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
"3 times my salary"
Difference is you have a salary due to your marketing/sales department who generally don't have a SALARY.
IE: when they don't produce (income or work for you), they don't get paid.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
While I've met a few 'programmers' whose skill set is limited - requiring everything to be laid out in black and white... far more often, I find competent programmers are also deeply insightful analysts; innovative problem solvers; dedicated, hard-working and have an eye for accuracy and an ear for honesty. While you can resort to ad-hominem when people disagree with you, such attacks don't work on machines... with fallacious argument off-the-table, those who program are forced to exercise other skills.
I definitely respect sales and marketing - when it's done well. There's a real skill in creating a buzz about a product or service you can deliver - and in closing deals to generate revenue. However... this does not mean that anyone who associates themselves with sales or marketing is automatically above constructive criticism. A major problem for both sales and marketing is that there's a motivation to short-termism... Marketing can blame someone else if they create a buzz about a product that can never be delivered (and it's easier to get people excited about things that are impossible than the mundane...) Sales suffers from the ABC - "Always Be Closing" problem, too, where there is considerable motivation to promise anything, no matter how dishonest, to 'get the deal done' - especially when some convenient 'office politics' can lay the blame for any subsequent disaster at someone else's door.
The underlying problem with all this is management. If sales and marketing run amock - without clear instruction to the aims of the business - they'll run the company into the ground soon enough. Similar catastrophes hang in the balance with technical staff and R&D... Executives need to both respect their staff, and take responsibility for the big picture... They need to avoid the temptation to micromanage (which leads to inevitable failure); they need to learn to draw on the experience of others - and to delegate without washing their hands of a matter. Without suitable direction, you'll end up with a ramshackle bunch of people all blaming each other as the company fails... this is not the fault of the employees - per se... or, even, of day-to-day management... but of the executive. In large corporations where failure as an executive is rewarded similarly to success, we should expect this sort of organisation-wide failure to be endemic.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:3, Insightful)
When a bug report is filed, the experienced programmer thinks "Oh shit. What did I miss."
The junior programmer thinks "Damn users. Always complaining. They don't know how anything works."
And what if your first thought is "Is this really a bug or was this intentionally designed this way? If it wasn't, should it still work as it does or should I change it?"
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also the same marketoids that get bonuses for sales that wouldn't have been possible if the coders hadn't put in huge amounts of unpaid overtime modifying production code to include ( non existent) features that the marketoids promised the customer without consulting the production team first.
Well, try to see it another way:
1) It's possible that the marketing team promised those features because it was the only way to sell the product. Your attitude seems to be going to the marketing/sales team and saying "This is what we made, go sell it, even if it's not what you could sell".
2) How is it their fault that you do unpaid overtime? Don't do it or ask for it to be paid.
PS. I'm a developer but I've been around. I've been in a couple of places where the software team wasn't listening about what the potential customers wanted (we were too full of ourselves to listening to sales I guess) and the places went down of course. By the way a potential customer is someone how has the money to buy the product and is able to make a purchasing decision. It's not another developer who think some feature would be cool to have for some reason.
Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really.
Sales/marketing is about finding out what a customer WANTS ... and then convincing the customer that he (she) NEEDS your product to be able to get whatever they want.
http://www.theaxeeffect.com/ [theaxeeffect.com]
You've probably seen the ads if you're in the USofA.
More likely they are trying to sell the product based upon the product's capabilities.
Not by claiming that it will provide (for example) the ability to "radiate rockstar vibes all day long".
Not really. But it gets back to the "rockstar vibes" and the radiating of such for the duration of a day. The programmer is selling a product that he (she) has a concrete understanding of. Does the customer NEED the features in the program?
Meanwhile, the salesguy is selling the image of being a rockstar in industry X and how such a rockstar would need this program to achieve that. Whether it will actually accomplish anything like that or not.
Again, that is easy to do for the programmer.
But that is not how marketing/sales works. See the above Axe example.
Which is why the golf course is so often featured in the sales/marketing plan.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
A proper sales process involves consultation between the marketing and development teams to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that goals are realistic. Having salesman unilaterally make promises about features, scheduling, etc. to "seal the deal" is a largely destructive process and results in a lot of the animosity seen in these comments. It's not just the development team that suffers either; making empty promises runs a high risk of alienating your customers and having them decide to look at other vendors for products and services.
Both the development and sales teams may see the other as a means to an end, but that's really not the case. Both sides what the same thing (make money) and its in their best interests to work together to maximize that potential.
as a manager (Score:5, Insightful)
This solution works for me too. Hand the code over. If it's clear you know what you're doing and have covered all the angles, I'll leave you alone. But even if you do know what you're doing it often helps to get perspective from someone who isn't so close to the work. And sometimes the boss has seen a lot of stuff you haven't and can open up new approaches for the experienced coder, too, because most people only learn what they have to know to get the job done and move on, so it's possible the boss has seen things that have been outside your critical path.
However, there are also a great many coders out there who honestly don't know their ass from their elbows and program by rote. This phenomenon has grown exponentially since the tech industry decided to outsource all work to India and China and insource H1-B's from India and China. So having a boss closely manage code development is often the only thing standing between endless spec minutiae and getting something to market.
Your mileage may vary.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
What a great example.
It's ironic that we roll our eyes in superiority when someone from Sales doesn't know how to use pivot tables, and then we turn around and do something that makes him roll his eyes. (Or turn red.)
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:3, Insightful)
So help a salesman from a local company become the new CIO (seriously, rewrite his resume for him, checking for spelling / grammatical errors, and cut your friends in on it, so they will vet him properly -> "Dude, this man wrote UNIX from scratch; the company needs him and his leadership!"), short the company stock (borrow against everything you own, and when you run out of collateral, see if you can't short naked), and laugh as the company burns down while you become an instant millionaire (inform your friends that snitches get stitches, and be sure to fax your new CIO's latest expenditure reports to the tabloids).
If asked, at some later point, why you did it, explain that you were simply employing the same tactics they used, only more effectively. Explain that while the new CIO may not have been the best fit (v 1.0), he had told you that he was willing to take some night courses to catch up on the things he needed to know (v 1.1 - a patch issued), and that after he had done this, he'd be perfect for the job. When they press about you making out like a king while others got burnt / the company collapses, explain to them that it's exactly the relationship salesmen and programmers have had for years -> one profits obscenely, the other makes good on third-party promises (and gets fired if they fail to meet those promises). Finalize things by handing the former sales staff individualized bad performance reviews, indicating that it was their fault the company went under.
Programmers do what they do because they like getting paid to program -> they like programming, and they like getting paid. Find me a programmer that does not like getting paid, and find me a programmer that does not love writing code. They do not exist (well, except for the burnt out ones).
Salesmen do what they do because they like getting paid to promote company products and close financial transactions -> they like getting paid, and they enjoy selling stuff to people. I am not aware of any salesmen who do not like getting paid, nor of any who do not trumpet their company's products nor attempt to close a deal whenever possible. Find me one that lacks these attributes, I do not believe they exist (perhaps someone fresh out of school?).
The programmer's skill-set is a lot more marketable than the salesman's skill-set. Colleges put out tens (hundreds?) of thousands of salesmen every year, while programmers are of a lesser quantity. A programmer's attributes includes the ability to problem solve, perform complex mathematical calculations, write reusable and legible code, meet requirements from people who do not understand computers or their inner workings, and perform extensive research. A salesman's attributes include the ability to problem solve, charm the customer into submission, lie in ways that would make the Devil blush, draw up requirements for the magical gnomes / elves / pixies (programmers) to follow, and an alcohol tolerance that is higher than the victim (person with purchasing authority from the interested company) that enables them to "guide" the intoxicated's good hand into gripping the pen and signing the purchase order (that the salesman just so happens to have typed up, in his front shirt pocket) all while the emergency personnel are trying desperately to administer CPR.
There's a shortage of people with the former skill-set, not so much with the latter. One would think that wages would reflect that, but one would be wrong.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahh sales... how I miss it. When you have merch to sell, you can talk to ANYONE, because you have that most wonderful of things, even better than an introduction... you have a pretense. You can walk up to any pretty lady you see and start a conversation if you've got a pretense in your pocketses.
Gets tiring running around in "ON" mode all day though.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, the sales guy usually gets a commission for making his sale, even when those overinflated promises burn the dev team for the next 3-6 months.
No wonder there is usually animosity.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
With all due respect, then you probably don't "speak Marketing" as well as you think you do. However I believe you wish things were harmonious between the 2 departments, and that's a good sign.
Tell me:
when things get hairy between you and Marketing do you find you have to pass the issue up to your manager / someone higher than you?
Perhaps you are the "higher power". If not, my advice would be: become that higher position.
When you reach an impasse with Marketing, keep your butt on that seat. Search for a solution; be creative, flexible.
They are not the enemy. To do their job they need your participation, and they don't always know what's possible. They're knowledge of technology is a fraction of yours.
Sometimes they ask for a Taj Mahal when in fact they'd be happy with a cubby house ... I've had conversations like the below more than once ...
BUSINESS: we need a website for XYZ by Monday morning.
ME: are you sure? You do understand you'll need to supply me with the content. I suspect you'll need at least a week for that.
BUSINESS: yeah I will actually.* Can we at least get just a home page with this poster on it?
ME: sure, that's trivial. You can have that by late afternoon.
* more often than not they get back to me in 3 weeks, which gives me time to work on the site.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
Posting AC as at work.
If you feel this way, and you produce code customers don't need, will you quit your job then as you're creating something nobody needs?
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Sales and marketing is mostly finding out what a person needs, why he needs that and how they can help the person with it.
You sir, are full of shit. I've spoken with enough salespeople, on both sides of the fence, to know you have abso-fucking-lutely no interest in how much somebody needs your product. You want to sell more, so that you get more money. Period. Everything else is just a justification, but the essence of sales is deception, and like any good grifter, you will never, ever, ever break character, to the point that you start believing the hype, and even living it--right up to the point that you think you might not make the sale.
Then, the gloves come off. I've had salespeople strongly imply that they were going to speak with my boss for not giving them sufficient consideration. I can't even count the number of salespeople that continued to try to keep me on the phone after I've made it clear that we already have something that solves our needs, and trying to convince a salesperson that you simply don't need their product at all? Hah! You might seem hard to convince to someone naive enough to believe your fake ultra-earnestness, but the truth is you know we don't need it, and you don't give a flying fuck.
I don't expect you to break character and accept this, but now that it's no longer my job to give every stupid asshole their "due consideration", I just want you to know that although I don't let it into my voice, I take great pleasure in politely saying, "No, thank you," and hanging up while you're still sputtering about how much I need a new tape library.
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
I will use as an example some friends of mine who are in the car business. They had learned that sales was about sticking it to the customer, so whenever their company made a lot of money, they saw it as having "pulled one over" on the customer. The classic example was where the dealership they worked for had gotten a car cheap for one reason or another and then sold the car for slightly less than its current market value. To use some numbers, let's say that a particular car had a blue book value (the blue book you have to be in the industry to get your hands on) of $13,000 but somehow the dealer had gotten their hands on for $2,000. If the dealer sold the car for $10,000, these people thought that the dealer had taken the customer. They had trouble understanding that the customer had gotten a great deal, they had gotten a $13,000 car for $10,000. If anybody had been taken, it was the person who sold the car to the dealer for $2,000 (and that is not necessarily the case because there could be reasons why someone would be getting value for selling a car for that far below the "going" price), not the customer who bought it for $3,000 less than what he would have had to pay elsewhere.
The point here is that they were so used to the idea that they were trying to "beat" the customer that it never occured to them that both parties could win in such negotiations. I was finally able to get one of them to understand the point here. I think it has made him a better salesman as he no longer views every sales interaction about trying to "win", but instead sees it as an attempt to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement (his dollars per sale are down, but his total sales are way up).
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
If a sales guy has sat in five meetings, and in four of them a customer has said, "man, I wish your product had x like the Acme product," he's going to ask for that to be added in. It's "valuable" if customers want it. Not matter how stupid you find it, no matter how much you'd rather add y (which perhaps no one has asked for), the sales guy thinks he can sell more product with x.
We're having this situation right now. Our sales department is screaming for "Enterprise Management Tools". Basically they want an integrated Nagios/syslog function put into our product. During one recent meeting one of our engineers stood up and basically told them to use Nagios and syslog. Which, from an engineering perspective was a perfectly reasonable idea.
Of course sales felt compelled to point out that:
1) We can't make any money telling them to use someone elses products.
2) Most of our customers have little or no expertise in setting up and deploying complex software systems.
3) The customers are telling us that they want this in our product like our competitors have. "You don't really want that, shut up" isn't exactly the response we want to give them.
Re:Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dramatic oversimplification, but that's common in armchair marketers. After all, everyone's an expert in marketing, right?
Not so much.
An antecedent post got it right - marketing is assessing customer needs, assessing product features, communicating how they align, and influencing product development when they don't. Examples like Axe are fine in the consumer packaged goods industry, but you don't sell corn on sexy. You don't sell industrial supplies on rockstar vibe. You don't sell ERP systems on hipster cool. You do sell iPads and shower soap that way, true; but that isn't a representative sample of the world economy.
Sales is convincing you to buy. Very different skill set than Marketing.
I was a programmer for years, then wrote a marketing system for my employer, who promptly moved me to Marketing to make me eat my dog food. It was great, until we were bought by new corporate overlords who gutted us for our manufacturing plants and closed us down... 25 years and several company moves later I'm a VP in Marketing in a Really Big Company. Been on both sides. And dealing with programmers is still frustrating to me as well as my peers who do not share the same background.
Why? Because the programmers are typically condescending, do not value what their clients do, and take the fashionable mentality of "Tell us what problem you are trying to solve and WE'LL design your solution." They inevitably return with something very powerful, horribly ugly, and far too complex for our employees to use. IT departments need to do a little marketing themselves - and develop in partnership with their customers. Understand our needs, yes, but work with us on designing our solutions. An unusable power solution that doesn't get used did not solve my needs.
Re:Not exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole "low on social skills"-phrase is a badly camouflaged euphemism for "bad at lying". Thank you very much for that compliment!
Re:It's not only programmers vs bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
If sales and marketing is about finding out what a person needs and a sales person finds out that what that person needs isn't something that they can supply, it is a rare sales and marketing person that will say so. They do exist. I speak to maybe one a year...
This is true. I work for a company that sells and installs luxury residential electronics. Any Sales 101 that is actually effective would have you first identify any problems that your potential customer is having. If you have a product or service that can help them out, then you can identify why your product or service solves their particular problem better than other products or services they may be familiar with. Some clients are perfectly willing to hand over a bucket with $30K in it for a Kaleidescape movie server system or a Lexicon audio processor, and I have actively discouraged them from doing so because it doesn't actually help them. I would much rather put that money towards something that they actually need/want because it encourages FUTURE sales and a trusting relationship. That's why I've never really understood the "cold call." It sounds cliche but a good sales guy is more of an adviser than a pusher. If you have no interest in my advice, then that's great I don't have to waste any more of our time.
Re:Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to help me, as a marketer? Make sure your website has detailed, meaningful specs easily accessible for every product you sell.
Including the price. Nothing puts me off a product more quickly than a website that has all the details except the most important one: how much the product will cost me. Want me to enter an e-mail address for a quote? Sorry, not gonna happen, so you've just lost a potential sale.
The best book I've read on sales is called "Getting Into Your Customer's Head", and describes a selling process that recognizes your prospect's needs and knowledge of their own industry/requirements. I highly recommend it. As a business-person I never sold anything I didn't believe would make my customer's lives better, and while I didn't make a gazzillion dollars I did perfectly well and never had much trouble sleeping at night.