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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
(Business theme here. Because I kind of want more business content on the Motte.)
I was wrong about Sales.
Beginning of my career, I was an engineer thinker, but who could Talk To Girls (TM), so I was sent out to talk to clients for technical sales reasons. Back then, I hated it because I was still trying to integrate the Autism firmware into my brain. Everything was logical, right? Cost-benefit analysis. Couldn't these stupid "customers" just see that our product provided value and pay us?
That's not how business works because that's not how humans work. Humans are not efficiency seeking automatons. We have problems, we want solutions. If we can't see how a thing helps us solve a problem, then that thing has a value of zero. Sales is the process of understanding problems deeply and then matching those problems (or not!) with a solution. It is applied empathy. It is one of the best skills to develop (so long as it is developed with integrity). If every Sales bro suddenly spent a year as therapists, we'd cure all this millennial mental health nonsense right away.
The fact is that deep engineer types who try to engineer products or services without caring about human interaction are truly trying to dehumanize humans. I get the same bad vibes from Sam Altman and Elon Musk because I truly believe both of them privately think, "Man, this would all be so much easier if like 90% of people just died." Technical elegance, engineering genius, physics-defying new invention don't. actually. matter if they fail to help people. I think the one hack here are the Theoretical Physicts who might actually be discovering capital-T Truth with math. But I'm too dumb to actually validate that.
But but but but ... Used car salesmen! Pushy boiler room stock brokers! The whole pharmaceutical industry! Can't sales be used for horrible awful very no-good reasons? Yes, but not try at scale for a long time unless there's tacit approval from lots of other humans. In all of the examples I provided, what's really going on is people want to defy reality in one way or another. They're being greedy. They don't want to live healthy they want to not feel pain. They want something they can't afford because they want to feel like they have certain status. Sales people playing into the self-deception of others isn't some black magic - it's psychological failure and manipulation that goes on constantly all over the world. Calling sales bad or evil is the same logical fallacy as calling human beings inherently bad or evil.
Can you tell I do a lot more sales and sales like things now? It's infinitely more satisfying that being a smarter than everyone else engineer. I'm not going to pretend like the software I've been involved with cured cancer, but, in many cases, I did see get applied to solve meaningful business problems. I like to think it contributed to economic growth in a small way.
If you want to be "part of a great effort to promote human flourishing" ... learn sales.
Seems to me more that sales types who complain about the way engineer types think or do their job are truly trying to dehumanize engineers.
Complaining about how other people think is dehumanizing?
Welcome to the Motte!
Can you offer more here than a basic "nuh-uh, YOU'RE stupid!" as a response? I'm willing to hear rebuttals to my evaluation of Sales style thinking, but I don't see much content in your reply.
The idea that the touchy-feely-schmoozy-douchey sort of interaction that salespeople are pros at is the be-all and end-all of human interaction and that what engineers engage in is not is "dehumanizing" the engineers.
Can you just ... try harder? There's no content here. Again, I'm all ears for a meaningful counterpoint, rebuttal, whatever. There are at least two or three already in this thread. Right now, you're saying "nah, salesmen suck" and leaving it at that.
Everything about your original post oozes contempt for engineers, from "autism" to "could Talk To Girls (TM)". But what I'm specifically complaining about is that you are claiming the way engineers work is not the way humans work. That places engineers themselves outside the bounds of humanity. It's a damn common thing, probably because sales and marketing people push it all the time, and they've gotten a lot of engineer types to accept it, but it's still bullshit.
Why? Why is it bullshit?
My post didn't say that the way engineers work is not the way humans work. My post said that engineers approach problems, solve them - often very well - and then fail to appreciate that solving the engineering problem alone is insufficient because what business is about is solving human problems.
Engineering, across all of its various domains, is a fantastically valuable endeavor for humans to pursue. On its own, it is not enough. And that's fine. We work, as humans, in complex organizations so we can leverage one another's relative strengths to achieve a larger goal.
Because you said;
I'll respond by saying that everything about your multiple posts oozes butthurt engineer who think that sales and marketing add no value. As a former engineer who felt this way for a long time, I have a strong prior that you're failing to understand some very human problems. You can change this and your life can improve.
The number one complaint engineers have about sales types is the sales people make deals by promising the customer things they expect engineering to back up. They then talk management into making it engineering's problem that the thing can't be done or is more expensive than the deal is worth. You can call that "butthurt" but it's certainly not dehumanizing.
Engineers communicate with each other. This mode of communication is not the same as salespeople use with each other or their buyer counterparts at the clients. Salespeople, including you, consider only the latter to be "human interaction". That's what's dehumanizing.
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