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I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but

I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to. Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team. And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management? So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success. Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)

JamesBarney 3y ago
> tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
- nickserv 3y ago
  I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later. Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years. Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows. For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything. With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
drewcoo 3y ago
> most engineers are terrible at selling Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And not just software engineers.

JamesBarney 3y ago

> tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".

nickserv 3y ago
I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later. Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years. Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
jimbokun 3y ago
I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows. For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything. With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.

drewcoo 3y ago

> most engineers are terrible at selling Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And not just software engineers.