[gumby]

> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.

One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with.

They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do.

Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK.

> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.

So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking.

I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.

[alex-moon]

This is honestly something I'm grateful for a lot of the time. I'm presently running a tech start-up in a highly technical domain (housebuilding, in a word) which also happens to be pretty hostile to businesses. People look at a planning application like "Why are there hundreds of documents here?" and it's because yeah, it is hard - there are huge numbers of variables to take into account, and the real "art" of urban design is solving for all of them at once. Then you send it to planning and basically no-one is happy, why haven't you done this and what are you going to do about that. You have to be pretty creative to survive.

Before that, I worked in a digital print organisation with a factory site. This factory did huge volumes on a daily basis. It was full of machines. They had built up a tech base over years, decades, and it was hyper-optimised - woe betide any dev who walked into the factory thinking they could see an inefficiency that could be refactored out. It happened multiple times - quite a few devs, myself included, learned this lesson the hard way - on rare occasion thousands of lines of code had to be thrown out because the devs hadn't run it past the factory first.

It's an experience I'd recommend to any dev - build software for people who are not just "users" of technology but builders themselves. It's not as "sexy" as building consumer-facing tech, but it is so much more rewarding.

[cl3misch]

Your second quote is the same as the first one. Did you copy the same one twice by accident?

[underdeserver]

I suspect the quote was pasted by mistake the first time.

[mananaysiempre]

Please also consider this when a localization contractor advertises lower costs by having human editors go over machine translations, then.