Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

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This was originally published in `Windows Sources: The Magazine for Windows Experts, March 1995` as far as I know.

It's been discussed on Hackernews a few times over the years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866486

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818556

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372726

Personally, I think the broader problem is that most software engineers, at least the ones I've worked with, have a flawed model in their head for how the business they are employed by works.

Partially this is why startups are attractive to some because you can actually connect the work you do day to day with the company's overall success. Even then it doesn't take much scale (something on the order of 1 level of hierarchy) before people lose touch with the dynamics of the business.

There are hard realities like the fact that the best technical product doesn't always win in the marketplace. That many times it's the wrong business decision to invest in innovation. That most programmer's jobs aren't to write code but to solve problems (and software just happens to be pretty good at doing that).

Marketers take over companies when you're selling a product that has become commoditized because brand is the thing that adds value to the company at that point. If sales is the thing that drives profit, sales will eventually run the company. If you want to work for a company that is run by engineers find one where the vast majority of the company's value is tied to the intellectual property their software source code represents.

The hive analogy is quite apt.

Hives operate very differently now than they did in the 90s, but what this gets right is that the flickering light the coders are attracted to is some kind of engineering grace, usually a thought leader or software guru or just a really nice person who is also incredibly hard working, deeply skilled in several domains including pure computer science, and a banger coder.

Other engineers get jazzed in such a situation and the music flows. But 10 years seems to be about the max you can keep an original hive together.

Every job is about solving problems. A programmer solves problems via programming.

That’s what programming means. Telling the computer what to do in a language it understands. We are typically well practiced at abstract, logical problem solving, because code has logical constructs. But if you are not writing code, you are not programming.

Now a program is an interface between some practical need and the computer. Of course, one needs to understand and know about both what one requires and what one provides. But there is no fundamental difference to any other craft in that regard.

Programming is a useful tool, but leaning on it in all situations is like a carpenter with only a hammer. There are many times when "more programming" is a possible but not the best solution to the situation at hand. Good and/or experienced programmers know when this is the case and reach for other tools as appropriate.

As a very simple example, perhaps integrating with the API provided by another team in the company is planned to take several weeks because it does not provide the "ideal" endpoint and you'd need to stitch together information from several responses. In some cases, simply going to the other team and asking if they can add another endpoint to expose the information you need will be a much quicker solution than doing all the work client-side. In my experience many junior devs would rather spend the weeks coding than the 20 minutes talking to another person.

Heya, I found this comment deeply insightful, thank you.

Could I ask you to please unpack this line a bit more:

> If sales is the thing that drives profit

What else could drive profit, if not sales?

> the company's value is tied to the intellectual property

In the case where unique IP is the core value proposition (the strategic "moat" if you will), isn't sales still what drives profit?

Put another way, I love what your comment implies, and so I'm trying to imagine a business that generates good profit that doesn't rely on sales as much, but I'm struggling.

Thanks! ^_^

I think that the majority of companies have differentiators that aren't sales.

First consider any company that's selling a commodity. Exxon's oil is the same as everyone else. I'm sure they might have sales in some capacity but they don't really need to convince someone on the fence to buy oil and they don't get a lot of value out of a slightly better negotiated price for their oil since again, if they try to charge more than someone else that customer will just go buy someone else's oil. So Exxon is generally speaking run by engineers because better more efficient engineering is the main way the company can derive more value than they do now.

Now consider Coca Cola. For the most part Pepsi is just as good as Coke. Maybe you're really picky about one vs the other but truth be told most people don't care and the market is wide open for someone else to make a similar soda. So what is their "moat"? Their brand, maybe you could say their supply chains, which are world class. So Coca Cola isn't run by sales people but it is run by marketing and operations people because that's what drives their continued profit.

What about Walmart? Again I'm sure Walmart does have salespeople working for them in some capacity but I'd say Walmart's main value driver is their ability to curate and acquire inventory. And sure enough at Walmart (and other retail stores) it's the Merchandisers and Buyers that have all the real power. It's not the "sales associates" running Walmart.

Among the Fortune 500 you find very few companies run by salespeople.

Say, governmental contracts can be very different from commercial sales.

Venture capital-backed companies used to often not care about operational profits, but about growth and market penetration, and the repay event was the moment when a large incumbent decided to buy the challenger startup. They do so to either add to their portfolio and acquire technology and talent, or even to quash the competitor which distracts their user base. Nevertheless, it's might be profitable to be bought and disbanded.

I suspect that sometimes profit is not even a motive (non-profit orgs, etc).

Thanks, this was very useful!

I imagine government contract suppliers, VC-funded startups, and Non-profit orgs - together - make up a decent chunk of all software companies.

I'm curious what you'd say about all the remaining software companies, namely the ones operating in a "traditional" sense (I can't think of a better word, but I suspect you know what I mean... your typical B2C or B2B for-profit bootstrapped business).

Is the latter group of companies' profit driven by sales and sales alone? Or is there something else that a business owner could focus on to drive profit?

As you can tell I'm still trying to unpack the OP's point above ^_^

Engineering happiness is directly tied to product quality. Product quality is directly tied to brand value. Brand value is directly tied to sales. It takes years for changes to promulgate through the chain, but they always do.

That being said, all businesses outside of banks have already taken much of O.S. Card's advice here. Programmers used to be forced into suits to bear the 9 to 5. Now, business casual gets more casual the more techy the company is. Flex time is now the norm. People complain about morning standups and Jira because they aren't doing four hours of waterfall strategy meetings everyday.

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