Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success with

Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success without selling software. But BoS is a conference about the business of software – hence the name – and sales is a primary concern for BoS attendees, because that's the whole point of the software business. The competitive advantage of software is that you only have to build it once. (And, if it's well-written, it costs as little to maintain as possible.) Then you sell it as many times as you can. That's what our professional pursuit of "scalability" is really about: The more "scalable" the product, the less time a company needs to spend worrying about how much work the software can do and the more time the company spends trying to convince people to give the software more things to do. The ideal software company would spend 100% of its time thinking about sales and customer satisfaction and 0% of its time thinking about software. If you or your peers are noticing sales happening more often, it may be because you're becoming more aware of how the software business actually works. You'll need to figure out how to cope with this knowledge. You can choose to embrace it. Or you can choose to avoid working in the software business, which is easy to do. (Most programming jobs are not part of the software business, and even those that are often have nothing to do with the strategic side of the business. Though, I have to warn you, once you've learned to see the strategic side of the software business it is hard to un-see. And the power to change the real world at scale is addictive and is not lightly discarded.)