As a co-founder (tech background but haven't coded in a while), I got comfortable with sales best when I hired a sales coach. There are so many things to learn in sales and a coach is often the fastest way to assess your inherent weaknesses and address them head on.
I paid $2k/mth about 10 yrs ago; at the time I felt scared to spend so much but once I realized it was an investment in me, and I put in the time to learn, I can safely say it continues to pay off even now. I quite enjoy sales now. Not saying I'm good at it but certainly a far way from "I hate sales and would much rather code".
Do you think that sales is among the many realms where freely available quality instructional material has become ubiquitous in the past decade? Not that it would ever work as a full stand-in for a paid coach, but it might be enough to bridge the gap for some of us.
Yes I think possible.
1. sales aptitude assessment tools like Objective Management Group (the one I took) help you identify core weaknesses that are critical to understand and work on.
2. Recording your sales calls (assuming you're on the phone) and then asking AI to critique it and coach you, with the above assessment as context, could be very helpful.
If you're disciplined I think the above approach may be a pretty good stand-in for a real coach. Or at least help you evaluate a coach better should you choose to pony up for one later.
I'd be careful sending raw audio to public APIs given the sensitive commercial info. A local pipeline with Whisper and Llama 3 is viable now and solves the privacy issue. It also keeps the long-term inference costs much lower.
Mine was a referral from the VP of sales (the coach was his dad and many of the reps in our team had been coached by him). Fwiw, his name is Rick Roberge. I think he still coaches. He's can be a bit antagonistic but he's very good at what he does and I'm glad I hired him.
My coach has a max timeline of 6 months so you are forced to swim on your own. I felt like I had the hang of it after about 4 months so stopped about then.
(sorry for delayed reply; I don't think HN notifies you of replies?)
Insane that Volvo doesn't just replace the car. The cost is trivial compared to the brand damage here. The complaint is so well documented and the customer is not being a jerk at all; not sure what Volvo's logic is.
Well if you don't replace the car you save 150K. But you lose a few million, let's say.
Those few million are invisible, the 150K you see right now and you know, for sure, you're saving it. Incidentally, this is how we got into this quality mess. Cutting quality seems like free money... except that it's not, it's just that nobody bothers to measure the opportunity cost.
And then one day you wake up and you're Chrysler, selling piece of shit vehicles for wayyy more than they're worth. And now your brand is worthless. But, at least you saved a few bucks ;P
They'll probably agree on a settlement where they don't admit any wrongdoing and give him a decent payout, but require him to take down the site and sign an NDA or something. So they don't necessarily need to replace all of them after that
If all he wants is a refund, that should do it. But if he's more interested in warning the world, hopefully he sticks to his guns and makes them give a straight up refund
> A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
1. If they really have so many faulty cars on the road that's a serious hazard and any accidents where people die may end up destroying Volvo entirely because of negligence.
2. An economically reasonable answer might be refund the guy making the complaint and ofter all other owners $10k credit towards your next Volvo purchase or free 3 years of maintenance and service. Something like this might be enough to stem the bleeding while protecting the brand.
Agreed. Put another way: because software has low marginal cost and high up-front cost (even higher in very competitive markets) it makes sense to raise venture early to hire a great team and build an awesome product that then scales incredibly well (great investment returns).
Oh cool! Thanks so much. (Btw, I didn't mean to suggest that the project should address an unanswered question. Ok to repeat known experiment if it's fun/insightful).
The gravitational acceleration one is cool. I remember doing this in high school back in the 90s. Let me suggest that to him. Thanks again.
Xpertly | Founding fullstack engineer | Remote (US), ideally Bay Area | $150k + 1% equity
Seed-stage company, backed by top-tier investors. CTO is former YC co-founder.
Founders previously built and sold startup so fewer dumb mistakes this time around (i.e. smarter about when to invest, such as in this hire!)
You: 5 years backend/fullstack experience at Series A/B company
Stack: Vue/Node/Postgres/AWS-lambda. Use of vector DBs/AI where it makes sense.
Why join? CTO is one of the smartest and nicest engineers to work with and learn from. We are building something enduring and useful, both for our customers and the world at large.
ps: we're somewhat in stealth so not much info on our socials yet about the company/mission etc.
Sorry for tangent but any recommendations for small smart phone (i.e. <6" screen)?
I like my iPhone 12 mini with its 5" screen (though it is glitchier than one would hope) but now all phones seem to be 6"+ which is hard to fit into a pocket or even manipulate with one hand.
I know the Samsung ZFlip 6 and Motorola Razr+ are small, though rather pricey at $800-1000. Any opinions from folks on reliability/usability etc of these?
I am embarrassed to say I have some Apple lock-in with earbuds and even basic conveniences like "find-my" working for my children's watches so not sure if these are worth staying with Apple for, even if I dislike their latest devices.
I'm very curious if experienced staff is available and less expensive now. As a venture-backed startup founder myself I'm quite eager to hire such folks and don't have the money to compete with larger firms. Maybe silly question but where are such folks hanging out, besides HN? :-)
Thanks for sharing your experience and glad to hear you've found a good job/team/product-environment!
My experience working with junior devs is that while they may be smart they haven't worked in teams and contributed to large codebases. So they may struggle to understand how a larger codebase is structured, where is the optimal place to fix an issue, how to structure their own code to be maintainable longer term etc. So code-reviews take longer, with seniors sometimes having to refactor a large amount.
I think some younger devs that contribute to open source projects do much better in this regard.
I don't have a view into many large tech companies but I imagine some level of tech debt exists in all of them. Are you suggesting that hiring fresh grads to resolve tech debt is unwise given the complexity of doing so?
Sorry to hear you're burned out. Do you want to work after your current job? If so, curious why you feel this is your last tech job. Is it because of ageism or something else?
thanks. i no longer find the work interesting, and the job market is very punishing. and i've seen 2-3 responsibilities being repackaged into a single job became normalised in the last 10 years.
I paid $2k/mth about 10 yrs ago; at the time I felt scared to spend so much but once I realized it was an investment in me, and I put in the time to learn, I can safely say it continues to pay off even now. I quite enjoy sales now. Not saying I'm good at it but certainly a far way from "I hate sales and would much rather code".
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