When salespeople link to their product whenever a related topic comes up. Or they start a war arguing with all criticism, that’s bad.
You aren’t living alongside your customers by popping in and answering questions about your product when you get an alert that someone mentioned it on HN.
It really comes down to the sales hiring manager recognizing this passion/emotional investment in applicants and weighting it properly. And also having a pool of people with this passion who want to work sales at this employer to begin with! How often would this actually happen in practice?
Let’s just use this site as an example. If you self-promote too much, you will get flagged. But if you regularly comment , submit some variety of stuff, then occasional self promotion is fine especially if it’s relevant and you’re transparent about it.
Different communities have different rules so figure out the rules.
Often times in the right context, selling something isn’t just an occasional faux pas you earned from other good behavior but itself a genuinely useful community contribution. You can sell useful stuff people want and are happy you offered.
Spamming, obnoxious drive by self promotion, sketchy non transparent astroturfing is annoying. But many developers go way too far in the opposite direction as evidenced by attitudes you see often here on Hacker News or Reddit. People act like if someone could possibly make a dime off something, it’s somehow morally abhorrent and must be stopped at all cost. FOSS is in many ways a blessing but had unfortunately perpetuated this bizarre mindset. With this mindset, everything you do should be for free, trying to make any money in any way is awful (except 99.99% of the time these same people will flock to high paying employers regardless of whether those employers follow these unwritten rules).
Money and authenticity are not incompatible concepts. Yeah sometimes they are , people “sell out “, especially when it comes to art. But on average you can be an authentic person who also offers a good or service for money.
One last quick note, the most well known festival for banning money is Burning Man . There’s a festival called Lightning in a Bottle that’s inspired by the burn that burners sometimes condescend about because it’s not as pure because it has food and vendor stands. But I’ve met a few talented artists who said they vastly prefer LiB because they can sell their art there and - shockingly- artists need money to provide themselves with food and shelter and they can’t make money at Burning Man.
It’s ok to make stuff then sell it and still interact with other humans. Selling stuff does not mutate you into an alien who can no longer authentically connect with another human because that dirty lucre completely compromised your soul.
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TL;DR you're mostly right, but Salespeople are still a distasteful necessity rather than something to be celebrated (without undermining any of your other points that it is fine, good, and morally permissible for people to sell things they've made or are working on).
Lest you dismiss me out-of-hand as another engineer who doesn't "get it", who is too hung up on technological purity and doesn't recognize that businesses are in the business of business, that you need to sell something in order to start the flywheel that lets you sell more things to get more money to build more things - trust me, I _do_ get it. I know that selling the product of your labours is essential for a) survival and b) being able to carry out more labours (I wish it weren't, but I recognize that that's the situation that we live in).
But you set up a false equivalence by simultaneously saying:
* '"Salespeople" are just people'
* 'people can be an authentic community member even if they happen to have something to sell to the community[...]if you regularly comment, ...then occasional self-promotion is fine[...]People act like if someone could possibly make a dime off something, it’s somehow morally abhorrent and must be stopped at all cost[...]It’s ok to make stuff then sell it and still interact with other humans. Selling stuff does not mutate you into an alien who can no longer authentically connect with another human'
The difference is that the latter examples are all well-intentioned and mutually-beneficial - a pre-existing community member (or, a new community member who already has ideals that align with the community) offering something that they genuinely believe will be of value. A Salesperson is not this. A Salesperson's intention is to intrude, deceive, and exaggerate to extract as much profit from a community as they can. A Salesperson has no interest in the well-being or survival of the community beyond its continued ability to be a source of profit. If that were not the case, _they wouldn't be a Salesperson in the first place_ - they would be a community member who happens to have things to sell (or recommend) to their community. The very act of defining their role as "focused on selling" - rather than "fostering a community" - presupposes this. If your job description is "Salesperson", and you go to your boss and say that you took an action that did not (and will not ever) result in more sales, but resulted in the community being healthier or more positive, you will be taken to task rather than congratulated (please do not "well actually" with the fact that "a more-healthy community will result in more future sales" - that is covered under "and will not ever").
As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely. Someone who shares the values, ideals, and intentions of a community selling to them is mutually beneficial and a net-good. Someone entering a community with the _intention_ of selling to them - a Salesperson - is much less likely to be beneficial, and more likely to be an exploitative snake. Maybe a "Salesperson" might actually make a worthwhile recommendation in a related thread ("You can sell useful stuff people want and are happy you offered") - good! Great! But they could have done that without _being_ a "Salesperson". They are, in a sense, not fulfilling their role there - they are instead acting in their role as community member (we can contain multitudes). Even if they were not employed as a Salesperson - even if they were in any other role in their company - and happened to notice that selling-opportunity, they could have taken it. The behaviours that are unique to a Salesperson are the harmful and distasteful ones - over-promotion, advertizing, astro-turfing, deception, cold-calling, pressure, intrusion.
But I know - I _know_ - that Salespeople are necessary for the growth and success of a company. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work if your competitors are actively advertizing. Simply building the world's best FooWidget is insufficient if no-one knows how great it is. You _need_ to get the word out that your product is awesome and will solve problems and can be bought for the low low price of $X.99, otherwise you won't get any money and you won't be able to keep making FooWidgets. But just because Salespeople are necessary for a particular goal (which is, itself, only worthwhile because we have not yet achieved Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism) doesn't mean we should approve of them. My body needs to take a shit every day, but I'm not exactly delighted about that fact. They fulfill an unfortunately-necessary purpose, but they make everything worse (or, at least, not-better) by so-doing.
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> 99.99% of the time these same people will flock to high paying employers regardless of whether those employers follow these unwritten rules
This is not hypocrisy. Society is currently set up such that you need a certain degree of excess wealth to be able to give things away for free (see my pining above for FALGSC). Accumulation of (a little bit of) extra wealth to someone who's going to use that excess to build something of value, is more of a social good than that same extra wealth accruing to someone who's going to use it on a second Lambo.
- If we're nothing but functions here, then why don't they just send robots?
- They don't send robots, Bob, for the simple reason, they haven't invented one yet. The day comes when they can build a robot to do what we do and make it work, then that's exactly what they'll do, precisely.
- But until that day, they send us.
> As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely.
Yeah, this feels like the problem to me. The unlikeliness of it is why there is such a distaste societally for salespeople, causing the blindness to the least evil type of sales person.
I sorta figured this out in another comment too. Thinking about the corporate mechanisms, sales hiring managers would need to weed people out properly based on them recognizing this balance. And on top of that, you would need a pool of applicants who actually have the personal investment in the community in the first place, or the potential to become personally invested. Very unlikely! Or so it feels across most sales hiring interactions.
> FALGSC
Haha, aaahh, if only
My suggestion is to put your money where your mouth is, and try it. You will most likely figure out soon enough that - like any almost any service job where you have a lot of independence - sales is really hard, nuanced and requires a lot of strategy, tactics and logistics.
There's a huge difference between someone who's using a phone script to book an appointment for a utility provider, and someone who is selling high ticket services like the one that most likely pays your wages. The fact that you've had a few people of the first scenario on the phone can give you a hugely wrong impression about sales (pars pro toto).
Sales can be as complex or simple as software development: there is a huge difference between someone who uses an if statement in an excel formula and somebody who builds an extremely optimized HFT system with FPGA or whatever they might use...
In fact, I think there might be lots of parallels to software architecture: you need to figure out the proper model that helps you to actually sell something: not only making sure the buyer has BANT (budget / time / authority / need), but also making the buyer aware that you exist, that he trusts you, what his triggers are, when he gets triggered, how the buyer process works, who your champion might be, macro-economical factors that make your sale a no-brainer, how the sector you're active in works, what your competitor landscape looks like, how the politics in the organisation work ...
Why do I have the need and think I have the authority to say this? I've been doing both sales and development, and being an IT guy first, my arrogance of "I can do sales and marketing too, it's just some ads / SEO / phonecalls and follow ups" has cost me almost a decade of opportunity cost. It's been a humbling and eye-opening experience that finally made me realize that - even though there are some jobs where you don't need your brain - a lot of jobs are way more complex than you can imagine. Parallels to "I can build that in a weekend" are not far away from "I could switch to a high end sales job by just reading a few books over the weekend".
So maybe acting authentically in sales role is doing the best you can (authentic to yourself and the customer) to a point where there comes to exist a conflict of interest with your employer?
Though, it still feels like there are too many constraints on your own authenticity? At all the jobs I've worked at, there existed a gap between who I was and what the company saw as an "ideal" me in practice (how I acted versus how HR or company policy or how higher ups would like people to act or how I've seen in brand guidelines for tone and word choice for social media). I feel like the individuality/mindset I bring to the table is a large part of why I'm paid for what I do. But if I applied the employer's constraints wholly and sincerely to myself without individual thought, I would most likely be awful at my job in practice. I feel these constraints apply much more in sales, as an agent of the company, you must _act_ like the company.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, and only truly hellish employers would want this. But it still feels, averaged over all employers, the "employer ideal" salesperson could not authentically act as an individual while being an agent of their employer. Which usually inspires distrust, and empathy at their constraints.
The real issue is too often, sales is often seen as a short-term thing - wow them, grab the money and move on to the next one. Whereas this approach is about trust and long-term relationship building (something old-school travelling salesmen used to often talk about). You might not get a sale from the person you recommended the competitor product to - but you will probably get several referrals ("these are really good people to deal with, and honest to boot - you should talk to them").
That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corporate authority (factory yours?), solving on-the-ground problems as a passionate management person (not because of the money but because you like it).