Sales are maligned for good reason. I'd wager I've experienced the "you know nothing about formal wear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in" salesperson a handful of times. Now, the number of times I've had someone try to sell me something while clearly not listening to what I have to say and getting uncomfortably pushy about it, well... yikes.
Two types of sales philosophies:
1. It doesn't matter what you're selling, it's about the sales technique.
2. Develop deep domain and customer expertise.
The former is the scammy type, the latter is the type we love to work with.
But the same is true in any industry. Too many of us in technology are doing the technology equivalent of 1--becoming experts in C++ or React--instead of becoming deep domain and user experts.
In software I like the person knows C++ or React in and out and I like the person who understands the domain, UX and such. I want both on the team.
I despise the guy who sells extended service contracts at the car dealership. I sure as hell don't want that guy selling software work because I won't be able to complete the work profitably and I'll be dealing with angry customers who don't trust me.
Engineers are awful too. The number of times I have been subjected to needlessly bad product designs far exceeds my negative interactions with sales people. And then there are the products that fail at their one function.
Not to mention the type of telemarketing salespeople being ragged on here are the equivalent of "software engineers" in bottom bracket outsourcing companies whose principal skills are installing WordPress templates and making excuses...
To take an extreme example:
Selling a starving person a meal doesn't just extract the price value, but creates it too.
You might argue that there are better or more efficient was of creating that value, but the fact that it is created is inescapable.
If you want to make a utilitarian value argument against it, you need to compare it to a real world alternative subject to scrutiny that is just as harsh, not a perfect world one.
Good salespeople are trying to connect customers with solutions that provide them value that they otherwise wouldn't have access to (generally because they weren't aware of it). Obviously, in practice, the line between that and the more negative experiences can be fuzzy and vary by one's perspective, but unless you have someone in-house who's dedicated to searching for new solutions... And then, they turn into a sort of salesperson themselves, with ambiguous allegiances. At least someone from the outside is someone you will always be skeptical about.
Engineers can create things that don't have value and salespeople can create value by matching problems with solutions, there are a lot of things we all very happily pay for after all. It's just not that simple.
What a bad, reductive point of view. While it's true there are shitty bad salespeople (as there are engineers), try selling anything without doing any selling of the product. Once the company gets to a certain size, having someone work on sales full time instead of getting an engineer who doesn't whan to do that work, work on that part time.
Low-recurrence and low-value sales are almost entirely about exploiting information asymmetry. Most peoples’ sales experiences are almost entirely low value. (Low here meaning the client isn’t going to do independent diligence and doesn’t have the capacity and willingness to retaliate if screwed.)
