5 ms·

I've done pre-sales despite not being on pre-sales pay before for a short time after all our pre-sales guys quit pretty much (long story). But the biggest thing

I've done pre-sales despite not being on pre-sales pay before for a short time after all our pre-sales guys quit pretty much (long story). But the biggest thing I did to get to that position is to be involved and care about what your customers are doing with your product. Be indispensable to your sales demos and POCs. If you become the go-to guy in your engineering team, you have an edge already because most sales and engineering orgs are so divided from each other you'll be in the know rather soon. I started down this way because while I love technology, I was getting pretty bored with the typical engineer personality types in every company I went to, and I was starting to get a little heat for being too customer focused. This makes sense when your company is at risk because they're drowning in features while engineering is light years ahead and into YAGNI territory. But simply caring beyond your engineering duties of ship stuff on a schedule is a huge step in mentality.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
> I was getting pretty bored with the typical engineer personality types in every company I went to I know what you mean, but I haven't given up yet. I still can't believe that a field this dynamic and intellectually challenging is so devoid of... personality and wit? Its probably different in the valley, but this has been my experience in Europe. After 7 years, I still don't get it.
- pbowyer 11y ago
  > I still can't believe that a field this dynamic and intellectually challenging is so devoid of... personality and wit? The stereotypes, as usual, do seem to have some truth behind them. I've lived with, worked with and hired engineers who behaved like machines, treated conversation and pleasantries as a waste of time, and some who existed in their own subculture. Perhaps they were full of personality and wit in their subculture, but in my experience... no. This is Europe too.
- scribu 11y ago
  From my experience, engineering is intelectually challenging in a very narrow sense - you tend to use a few core skills over and over. Even when you learn a new paradigm, like functional programming, it's still within your comfort zone. It takes serious psychological effort to peek out of your hole and be willing to learn about a truly foreign subject, such as sales. Besides that, I'd bet that a lot of programmers suffer from social anxiety (I used to be one of them), which severely limits your ability to express any personality that you might have.
  - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
    Yeah, but! You could say most of these things about sysadmins, and some of them were the funniest guys I've ever met. I think the fact that these stereotypes even exist means that there could be a biological reason behind it. Levels of dopamine and serotonine in the brain, the amount of muscles, a lean or a broad frame, social anxiety,... These things interest me a lot, mainly because they affect me as well of course, so if there is a place to discuss them I'd love to hear about it. Actually I'm surprised this isn't a regular HN topic .
    - scribu 11y ago
      To be an effective sysadmin, you have to be able to work well under pressure. If you have anxiety, you will definitely not work well under pressure, so programmers and sysadmins have different personality traits, methinks. Regarding biological reasons, you might be interested in the Human Behavioral Biology course [1]. I'm half way through it and it's jam packed with knowledge. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
      - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
        Well this will consume some of my evenings, thx!
      - devonkim 11y ago
        Programmers have to program under stress on occasion for fixing or shipping stuff rather quickly before, say, a meeting with VCs. But this is where the sysadmin / execution-focused folks will perform better on what would seem to be menial tasks because most programmers are so used to controlling their work environment while sysadmins and network admins are oftentimes running under tight "get it done right now" situations. I've hired a couple guys for my ops team that are primarily developers because I want a more forward-thinking and feature development pace for the work we do, and just plain better forethought would cut these stressful scenarios down to maybe half an hour of troubleshooting instead of hours and days.
- devonkim 11y ago
  It depends very much from company to country and so forth, but I've worked in the U.S. for over a decade now across both massive and tiny companies and the best way I can put it is that if your engineering team can fairly neatly fit into the different engineer stereotypes that are in the show Silicon Valley or the IT Crowd at least 80% of the time, you probably have selected for a rather narrow spectrum of people. There are a great deal of very intelligent people that cross so many different ranges across humanity and IT / software seems to select for just a small slice of the possibilities and the richness that exists. Even among companies you are biased for certain personality traits (big companies tend to attract those that are less risk averse or with children due to the 9-to-5 culture as stereotype and vice versa with smaller companies). The European immigrants I worked with certainly had a different sense of all sorts of things as well as the Middle Eastern and African immigrants. But gosh do they all share some strange similarities despite all these differences. Things do get rather boring potentially outside the usual nerd crowds. For example, I really don't care about following competitive sports - this is a huge, huge social handicap in the U.S. even among women in many regions. This becomes even more pervasive among sales folks for sure - I think most sales folks that are pretty good performers are actually pretty darn.... moderate if we tried to "average" personalities. It's clear among managers that engineers tend to be a rather specific group of people that doesn't necessarily need to be accounted for among other types of organizations.
  - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
    > Things do get rather boring potentially outside the usual nerd crowds Yeah that seems to be the case - or at least the challenges are on a different level. The thing about competitive sports: I've found a good way to handle it is to be very firm and confident about not being interested in it at all, thankyouverymuch. Just brush it off in a non-awkward, humorous way.
    - devonkim 11y ago
      Here's the thing, you might be able to side-step the issue, but when your competition's sales guys chat about the NCAA finals hopefuls, team composition, coach histories, and certain rivalries and you can only comment a little bit at the dinner after your demos, the customer will remember more levity and just plain fun about the other guy than you when it comes to the emotional side of "which company has reps I will have more rapport with?" Think of it similar to dating and trying to impress a few girls - without a sense of humor you are at an immediate disadvantage. This is what most engineers outside sales would think of that golf course meeting or something, but it's all about establishing something more than just a one-time transaction relationship - it's going to continue, so it's not far off from the dynamics of dating aside sexual part. But consider for a moment that everyone is on even footing in a dating pool - the one that is most memorable and associated with good feelings where you let yourself be vulnerable will win. Enterprise sales is complex but still fundamentally rather emotional among the decision-makers. The kinds of companies that buy $10MM of software in a year from one vendor are only so many, so there tends to be reputations that follow people, and many sales persons simply follow along a few friends that are executives at organizations across their careers and sell whatever software they're peddling every time they switch companies.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

> I was getting pretty bored with the typical engineer personality types in every company I went to I know what you mean, but I haven't given up yet. I still can't believe that a field this dynamic and intellectually challenging is so devoid of... personality and wit? Its probably different in the valley, but this has been my experience in Europe. After 7 years, I still don't get it.

pbowyer 11y ago
> I still can't believe that a field this dynamic and intellectually challenging is so devoid of... personality and wit? The stereotypes, as usual, do seem to have some truth behind them. I've lived with, worked with and hired engineers who behaved like machines, treated conversation and pleasantries as a waste of time, and some who existed in their own subculture. Perhaps they were full of personality and wit in their subculture, but in my experience... no. This is Europe too.
scribu 11y ago
From my experience, engineering is intelectually challenging in a very narrow sense - you tend to use a few core skills over and over. Even when you learn a new paradigm, like functional programming, it's still within your comfort zone. It takes serious psychological effort to peek out of your hole and be willing to learn about a truly foreign subject, such as sales. Besides that, I'd bet that a lot of programmers suffer from social anxiety (I used to be one of them), which severely limits your ability to express any personality that you might have.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  Yeah, but! You could say most of these things about sysadmins, and some of them were the funniest guys I've ever met. I think the fact that these stereotypes even exist means that there could be a biological reason behind it. Levels of dopamine and serotonine in the brain, the amount of muscles, a lean or a broad frame, social anxiety,... These things interest me a lot, mainly because they affect me as well of course, so if there is a place to discuss them I'd love to hear about it. Actually I'm surprised this isn't a regular HN topic .
  - scribu 11y ago
    To be an effective sysadmin, you have to be able to work well under pressure. If you have anxiety, you will definitely not work well under pressure, so programmers and sysadmins have different personality traits, methinks. Regarding biological reasons, you might be interested in the Human Behavioral Biology course [1]. I'm half way through it and it's jam packed with knowledge. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
    - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
      Well this will consume some of my evenings, thx!
    - devonkim 11y ago
      Programmers have to program under stress on occasion for fixing or shipping stuff rather quickly before, say, a meeting with VCs. But this is where the sysadmin / execution-focused folks will perform better on what would seem to be menial tasks because most programmers are so used to controlling their work environment while sysadmins and network admins are oftentimes running under tight "get it done right now" situations. I've hired a couple guys for my ops team that are primarily developers because I want a more forward-thinking and feature development pace for the work we do, and just plain better forethought would cut these stressful scenarios down to maybe half an hour of troubleshooting instead of hours and days.
devonkim 11y ago
It depends very much from company to country and so forth, but I've worked in the U.S. for over a decade now across both massive and tiny companies and the best way I can put it is that if your engineering team can fairly neatly fit into the different engineer stereotypes that are in the show Silicon Valley or the IT Crowd at least 80% of the time, you probably have selected for a rather narrow spectrum of people. There are a great deal of very intelligent people that cross so many different ranges across humanity and IT / software seems to select for just a small slice of the possibilities and the richness that exists. Even among companies you are biased for certain personality traits (big companies tend to attract those that are less risk averse or with children due to the 9-to-5 culture as stereotype and vice versa with smaller companies). The European immigrants I worked with certainly had a different sense of all sorts of things as well as the Middle Eastern and African immigrants. But gosh do they all share some strange similarities despite all these differences. Things do get rather boring potentially outside the usual nerd crowds. For example, I really don't care about following competitive sports - this is a huge, huge social handicap in the U.S. even among women in many regions. This becomes even more pervasive among sales folks for sure - I think most sales folks that are pretty good performers are actually pretty darn.... moderate if we tried to "average" personalities. It's clear among managers that engineers tend to be a rather specific group of people that doesn't necessarily need to be accounted for among other types of organizations.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  > Things do get rather boring potentially outside the usual nerd crowds Yeah that seems to be the case - or at least the challenges are on a different level. The thing about competitive sports: I've found a good way to handle it is to be very firm and confident about not being interested in it at all, thankyouverymuch. Just brush it off in a non-awkward, humorous way.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    Here's the thing, you might be able to side-step the issue, but when your competition's sales guys chat about the NCAA finals hopefuls, team composition, coach histories, and certain rivalries and you can only comment a little bit at the dinner after your demos, the customer will remember more levity and just plain fun about the other guy than you when it comes to the emotional side of "which company has reps I will have more rapport with?" Think of it similar to dating and trying to impress a few girls - without a sense of humor you are at an immediate disadvantage. This is what most engineers outside sales would think of that golf course meeting or something, but it's all about establishing something more than just a one-time transaction relationship - it's going to continue, so it's not far off from the dynamics of dating aside sexual part. But consider for a moment that everyone is on even footing in a dating pool - the one that is most memorable and associated with good feelings where you let yourself be vulnerable will win. Enterprise sales is complex but still fundamentally rather emotional among the decision-makers. The kinds of companies that buy $10MM of software in a year from one vendor are only so many, so there tends to be reputations that follow people, and many sales persons simply follow along a few friends that are executives at organizations across their careers and sell whatever software they're peddling every time they switch companies.