Comment by joncampbelldev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joncampbelldev | Hacker News Reader

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Not the person you're responding to, but those comments are not saying the same thing at all.

One asserts that nerds want to know the details for ego reasons.

The other asserts that he (presumbly as a self-proclaimed "nerd" in this situation) wants to know the details because otherwise he has no idea if the product is even useful.

If the product being sold is actually that simple e.g. "trade stocks with a few clicks" thats fine. But for anything that requires customisation, integration or any kind of technical support thats not true. You need to know the details to know if it will work.

This very much matches the stereotypical enterprise sales disaster i.e. buzzwords and flashy things sold to c-suite that are then suffered by those who actually use them and find that it doesn't do what they need

EDIT: also in this context where the article title specifically mentions "technical documentation" we are clearly not looking at the super simple type of product.

I read the comments and I agree but I would describe that in my way:

Car mechanic buying bolts needs to know thread and sizes of bolts, he does not care about "our bolts are best bolts in the world", if he would spend an hour with sales rep that feeds him marketing and in the end it turns out they don't sell what that mechanic needs, it will make him angry.

IT people or "nerds" know what they need and they have specifications to meet. Making it an "ego" thing is silly :).

Car mechanics care about the standard. A grade 5 bolt is different from grade 8, even though grade 8 is objectively stronger there are many places where they are too strong and so you need to use the objectively worse bolt. I don't remember the terms metric uses for the above, but there are metric equivalents for the same reasons.

That's a misinterpretation. Best bolts in the world doesn't mean strongest, that's where we'd use the word strongest. Best bolts is an opinion.

A max strength before shearing/failure is just another req. for the task the mechanic wants to know, it doesn't make them objectively worse unless they were used in a situation where they needed to be stronger.

I didn't want to type in a 1000 page engineering textbook. What I wrote is close enough to make the point, but you are correct as well.

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