Agreed. But I don't think he's really advocating shielding programmers completely from the sales process, or from customers. He does say: some patient tech sup

Agreed. But I don't think he's really advocating shielding programmers completely from the sales process, or from customers. He does say: some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls I think it's nice to shield developers from the chaos of the air conditioner installations, but feedback based product development is definitely something they should get involved with. It's harder with startups, of course, because if you have limited cash, you can only hire a limited number of people and those people then have to do everything. Not sure how FC (and even 37s) handled this when they were small (in revenue) and couldn't just hire support staff to create this development abstraction layer. I think just dumb luck had a lot to do with it, though.