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Comment by xapata | Hacker News Reader

If you ask an enterprise vendor if their software has feature X, the answer is always, "Yes!" You'll find their software is infinitely customizable with just a bit of configuration. What they're not telling you is that their configuration tool is really a poorly implemented, proprietary programming language. You won't be able to configure the software yourself and must now hire consultants to read your watch and tell you the time.

The good news is that the enterprise sales folks know all the best restaurants in town. Cocktail bars, too.

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> If you ask an enterprise vendor if their software has feature X, the answer is always, "Yes!" You'll find their software is infinitely customizable with just a bit of configuration.

Or, like it happens in smaller B2B deals, they'll say "Yes!", and then after the meeting go to the dev team and say: "we just signed a contract in which we promised feature X; you need to implement it in two weeks".

>"we just signed a contract in which we promised feature X; you need to implement it in two weeks".

This hits wayyyy to close to home.

You also got two weeks? You guys are both lucky.

I knew a CEO once who honestly believed that any feature he could conceive of could be implemented in two weeks.

He was quite successful....

Any before anyone asks what the logic was behind this - there wasn't any - he just chose to believe it and ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Optimism beyond the reasonable may be a critical trait for a successful CEO. Not necessarily what you want in your own manager, of course, but company leaders need to chase risk in order to do well and that's hard to do if you're ready to believe all the (reasonable) opposition that new ideas face.

So there's the idea of 'depressive realism'. Basically, that depressed people may have more accurate judgements of the world than non-depressed people, since they're more willing to recognize the frequency of bad stuff.

I've always sort of wondered if there's a reverse effect - if the kind of person who can eagerly commit a big chunk of their life to a task with a 95%+ risk of failure is significantly less likely to be in touch with reality than others.

Add survivorship bias to unreasonable optimism, and you get a culture of celebrating CEOs who demanded the impossible and got it enough times that the companies made money.

Meanwhile, CEOs who demand the impossible and don't get lucky are not celebrated, but are also not widely publicized as failures, so people don't learn from those lessons.

They wait for the signature?

I thought it was always "in the bag, last couple of redlines to get sorted, but that'll be sorted by the end of the week, no worries."

But yeah, 2 weeks to implement, then it sits there whilst they sort out some overlooked complication

Wait for the signature? Ha. Ahahaha. That's the best case. On some tasks, they wait until two weeks after the due date before telling the team about the feature.

(One contract job I did a while back, the first thing the client asked me for some was some documentation. The forwarded email trail explaining exactly what documentation also contained an email sent two weeks prior, apologising for the delay and saying 'their programmers' were working on it.)

I had this happen also with a particular customer once. They were a large financial institution who bought our product to replace their previous software package that had been way past EOL.

Because they already had software to do this task, my boss assumed that determining the custom requirements for them would be very straightforward, and would only take a week or two. We ended up spending the next 3 months in very tedious conference calls preparing requirements documentation that their obnoxious internal processes required.

Just when we finished that, the customer came back and said, "That's great. Government-Alphabet-Agency gave us a hard deadline to switch to the new system in three weeks." By that point the scope of the project expanded to about 3 months of work.

We still managed to ship something for their deadline, somehow, and we're still providing maintainence for that, oddly enough.

If you ask an enterprise vendor if their software has feature X, the answer is always, "Yes!"

FWIW, not all enterprise software vendors do that. We don't, for example.

Just last night I was running through a demo for a prospective customer, and my contact asked about some new features. The answer was "we have some of that partially implemented, another is trivial, and another one is going to take some research. Ballpark estimate is probably 6 weeks or so to do all that".

Of course maybe it's different when you're a founder who has spent his entire career as a developer and got sick of that exact bullshit routine. :-)

Did you close the sale? (Not being an ass. Curious)

Not yet. The conversation is ongoing though.

> who has spent his entire career as a developer

If I'm right, this means you're selling to software companies, or companies doing in-house development?

As much bullshit as there is in selling software to software companies, it seems to be so much worse outside of this. Enterprise vendors selling to non-technical firms seem far more willing to promise the moon and stars on the basis that they can hand-wave it as "a job for the software guys". Whereas I think most devs hear that claim and translate to "six months of work", opening up a bit more room to do business by being honest. Congrats on not taking the common approach!

If I'm right, this means you're selling to software companies, or companies doing in-house development?

Not really. We're not doing developer tools or anything like that. Well.. not like an IDE or anything. The products we're talking to this prospect about are an Enterprise Social Network product and a Document Management product.

That said, we do have a machine learning /cognitive services platform in development, so that's borderline a "developer tool", but we're not in the same space as like an Atlassian or anything.

"... another one is going to take some research. Ballpark estimate is probably 6 weeks or so to do all that."

One of these things is not like the other.

"some" research. Not talking "fundamental research" stuff (like particle physics) here. Just looking at the API's provided by a 3rd party product to see how the integration would work.

That said, I did change that answer to "more like 8 weeks" after we spoke further. And that was still just a rough estimate. Anyway, regardless of how accurate that is, the point is that we don't do the "anything can be done in two weeks" thing. :-)

I've been burned far too many times by tasks that started as, "glue this API to that API", only to discover that "that API" anything remotely like what I needed.

I hear ya. Same here.

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