[HN Gopher] Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capa...
___________________________________________________________________
Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It
Was All a Lie'
Author : gemanor
Score : 211 points
Date : 2023-08-13 11:04 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| jmacd wrote:
| This is the enterprise equivalent of putting up a landing page
| and collecting email addresses. Salesforce uses the same lean
| product development concepts that we espouse here. They test
| messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real
| customer demand. It just all happens with a massive marketing
| budget.
|
| In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product.
| Salesforce is very careful to "safe harbour" their statements
| about future products and their actual customers know that.
|
| While I was there after having sold my company to them, I
| launched several products and features for others. Every time we
| developed a concept, shopped it to early adopters and found
| design partners to test it.
|
| Incidentally, salesforce customers often pay handsomely for some
| of that engagement. That is because they know that if Salesforce
| is serious about the product, this is their best chance to get
| the functionality as a customer.
|
| Also, if you go in to a meeting with Parker Harris and you end up
| getting fired, I would place a bet any day of the week that YOU
| are the asshole. Parker is just a fantastic human being based on
| my experience.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Sounds like Salesforce has gaslit their customers into
| believing any bullshit their marketing department dumps.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| more likely driven by their sales team (which also influences
| marketing), sales people love to overpromise because most of
| their job is done after the sale - often the idea is that
| they'll sell enough to warrant building it
| gregw2 wrote:
| When I was younger and worried about how we were going to
| execute on some project a veteran (ex-DEC) salesperson had
| sold, he pulled me aside and laid some gnomic-to-a-young-
| engineer sales wisdom on me...
|
| "Look, never confuse the sales cycle with the install
| cycle..."
|
| Several years later, I was enlightened.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The Salesforce-arati are out in force, I see. I don't know the
| context of this story, but I also know you don't make it to CTO
| of Salesforce by burning a few bridges. Generally, Salesforce
| has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind
| in a few areas.
|
| It seems the advertising in question was creative in its
| language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight
| though.
|
| It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is
| not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain
| product features.
| tootie wrote:
| I'm a veteran of terrible enterprise software and Salesforce
| is mostly not terrible. It's overweight, complex and
| expensive, but it's also powerful, customizable and
| interoperable in all the ways you need it to be. The main
| value to me is that if you look at any remotely related
| software like automation, data integration, billing,
| reporting they all have a native Salesforce integration as
| their first listed feature. That's incumbency and clout
| moreso than a technical vote of confidence, but it still
| matters to CTOs. I'll say that nearly all their acquired
| products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in
| any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud
| especially).
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Storage in Salesforce is super expensive. And as you said
| any of their acquired products barely integrate with
| Salesforce.
|
| Salesforce success is reliant on lack of serious
| competition. Beyond that it is decades behind modern
| software engineering practices.
|
| Do you seriously need a third party tool to back up the
| data in a SaaS application? Astonishing!
| tootie wrote:
| Storage cost is nuts. They announced a migration to AWS
| that is going to start rolling out. I'm not sure if
| that's going to let us utilize cloud native storage.
| sleazebreeze wrote:
| > I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've
| worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any
| meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud
| especially).
|
| I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year
| or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there
| was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau
| into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that
| and are still struggling.
|
| There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the
| Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without
| huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and
| couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted
| planning process in and only made it worse.
|
| Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the
| efforts and the highest level of executives were only
| interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition
| target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care
| about Tableau the product.
| cavisne wrote:
| Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care
| less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in
| FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince
| everyone the project has been launched.
|
| My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing
| this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.
| fatnoah wrote:
| I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and
| met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times
| (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and
| humility.
|
| Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our
| small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed
| an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him
| until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up
| chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a
| product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly,
| asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him
| firing anyone.
| CSSer wrote:
| Do you think of firing someone as something mean or
| unintelligent? He sounds like someone I'd love to meet but
| your comment interests me because I've never really thought
| of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of
| decision.
| tw04 wrote:
| > Do you think of firing someone as something mean or
| unintelligent?
|
| Unjustified firings, absolutely. I've seen plenty of
| horrible, vindictive managers fire talented folks simply
| because it wasn't "one of their guys". I can't say I've
| ever seen a good manager let a good person go unless it was
| due to company mandated force reduction.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| I've definitely seen good managers drop employees that
| made environments toxic
| tw04 wrote:
| I guess I used "good person" as a catchall because I'm on
| mobile and didn't want to type out the various criteria
| of people you want to work with. I
| personally don't consider someone who makes the workplace
| toxic "good".
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| Oh, I didn't notice the "good" selector, my bad
| fatnoah wrote:
| The article implies that the VP was fired for disagreeing
| with the company, and Parker didn't really give off a "my
| way or the highway" kind of vibe. You never know, though.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes. Firing someone should always be a last resort;
| generally it means either that the person is hopelessly,
| irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent
| at leading people. If your hiring processes are worth
| anything, the former is exceedingly rare.
| duggan wrote:
| Never hiring anyone who isn't a good fit or will become a
| poor fit is a very high bar to set.
|
| Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're
| not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every
| now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies
| on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring
| processes.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| Not at the VP Product level.
| fooster wrote:
| EVEN MORE true at the VP level because the stakes are so
| much higer.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree firing should be the last resort, but I very much
| disagree that "it means either that the person is
| hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you
| are incompetent at leading people."
|
| This is why I say that often times the worst people to
| hire are those that are "just below average mediocre".
| Reason being that, as you point out, it is not hard to
| fire people who are blatantly incompetent. And of course
| many/most people can be coached to improve, but I've seen
| cases where, despite lots of coaching, people chronically
| underperform.
|
| I consider it a mark of bad management when these subpar
| performers are only let go during layoffs. Conversations
| should be open, ongoing and constant, and people should
| be given lots of coaching, time, and plenty of heads up,
| but it does nobody any good to essentially string people
| along when folks aren't cutting it.
| cloche wrote:
| Yes I am struggling with this exact situation. A person
| on my team fits this profile. They _can_ do the work. It
| 's just that their output is below average except for the
| times when we've had serious discussions about their
| performance. They will improve for maybe a month or two
| before regressing back to their previous level.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| Fire them. They are wasting your time. Their yo-yo output
| will be something that is noticed by the rest of the team
| which is demotivating for them. You gave them a chance.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Or just that the market is down, or you over hired, or
| your strategy has changed, or a million other reasons
| that you may have employees you no longer need.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There is a recognized difference between firing someone
| (which in common parlance means someone's employment was
| terminated for underperformance or other cause) vs.
| having a layoff, which is what you've described.
| fooster wrote:
| I find this a very naive view point. Hiring is
| exceedingly difficult, and the reality is that no matter
| how well intentioned your process you never know whether
| the person you've hired fits with your organization, or
| isn't an outright liar. If you hire people, you will fire
| people (or be stuck with people who for whatever reason
| don't work well).
| leksak wrote:
| Also, people change and might not be the same person they
| were a few years ago. People become jaded, among other
| things.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts
| that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then
| make R&D investment based on real customer demand.
|
| The crucial difference is being honest to your customers that
| this is your process, versus trying to hide it so that only
| your most savvy long-term customers know it's a mirage.
| [deleted]
| tlogan wrote:
| There seems to be more beneath the surface.
|
| Given Karl's background as a co-founder of Evergage, a CDP
| company acquired by Salesforce, it's implausible he wasn't
| familiar with lean development.
|
| I suspect there were other reasons for his firing, with Parker
| perhaps being the messenger.
| EGreg wrote:
| I have a question
|
| I am not a lawyer, but isn't doing this (including landing
| pages which promise a product that doesn't exist) technically
| "false advertising", and a large company can be sued (and
| theoretically a small one too) for punitive damages rather than
| actual ones? Any lawyers in the house can chime in.
|
| PS: I recently was reminded of this when a 24-hours gas station
| store was closed with a note on the door saying it's closed at
| night, but with the giant 24 hour signs still on the building,
| and on Google it had said 24 hours. The store isn't selling
| essential things. But what if it had been the actual gas
| station and the people ran out of gas?
| [deleted]
| sowbug wrote:
| I don't have any experience with FCC false-advertising
| actions, but most deception laws require proof of actual
| deception, or at least damages based on reasonable reliance
| on a statement. If someone read a landing page, reasonably
| thought the product was available now, and then took
| reasonable action (maybe hiring someone to use the product
| and paying a salary), then there might be a valid complaint.
|
| But the key is _reasonable_ reliance, or _actual_ deception.
| If a company says "coming soon!" for a new kind of bandage,
| and someone bleeds to death because they thought "soon" meant
| in the next 60 seconds, that's unreasonable, and nothing is
| actionable. Or if someone's actual damages were that they
| don't like when companies like Salesforce engage in test
| marketing before developing products, but they couldn't
| demonstrate that it hurt them other than annoying them, that
| isn't a cause of action because there's no deception.
|
| For the 24-hour gas case, the store owner is clearly
| struggling, and can't afford to stay open during slow hours.
| They apparently can't afford to buy new signage, either, or
| are hoping business improves soon so they can go back to 24/7
| operation. There might be a technical violation, but
| enforcing it would likely be the owner's last straw, meaning
| one fewer gas station in the community. What good would
| enforcement be?
| shrubble wrote:
| They are open 24 hours, just not all in a row...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm also not a lawyer, but that would clearly be false
| advertising, right?
|
| One thing I'm curious about--some states have a law that
| stores must accept cash. It is pretty common for a gas
| station to require manual intervention to take cash. I wonder
| if this 24 hour gas, but the store isn't always opened, gas
| station would fall afoul of that sort of law.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Not a U.S. lawyer, but check the concept of "puffery."
| liveoneggs wrote:
| salesforce has plenty of lawyers
| adrr wrote:
| Being on Heroku and dealing with the lack transparency of the
| security breach by Salesforce speaks to opposite of them being
| truthful. How long did it take them to admit to being breached?
| We had to get our information from 3rd parties about the breach
| and that we needed to rotate secrets.
| fdye wrote:
| So I guess "Whistle-blower" is appropriate here, but marketing
| a "batch" processing system as "real-time" seems to be a bit of
| a nothing-burger in my mind. I think the more telling thing is
| he seems to have raised this multiple times to various
| superiors and not gotten the hint that they weren't concerned.
| Someone at a VP level (especially at Salesforce) should have
| enough corporate etiquette to get the hint. Unless he believed
| this would literally be hurting/killing people (and I find the
| hospital/care marketing laughable) it doesn't seem appropriate
| to not accept "I heard your concerns but we will still be
| launching on X." He is certainly not financially liable for an
| overzealous marketing department. I've certainly raised
| concerns from a technical perspective to be shot down in launch
| meetings, particularly around marketing claims. However, at a
| certain point you do your best and start supporting the team
| effort.
| justrealist wrote:
| > However, at a certain point you do your best and start
| supporting the team effort.
|
| Yeah, I don't think opting-out is the morally superior option
| if you know that the competition is lying through their teeth
| too.
|
| At a point, the only way to improve the world is to make
| things better than they otherwise would have been.
| Complaining feels good but at the end of the day doesn't
| deliver more value to customers, hospital patients, or anyone
| in-between.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective
| product. Salesforce is very careful to "safe harbour" their
| statements about future products and their actual customers
| know that.
|
| I don't see any of that in the linked blog post by salesforce
| describing genie. Can you provide quotes of where they do that?
|
| What I see is a blog post describing current capabilities of
| their product. They even make a point of sayong how all their
| customers benefit from "Genie".
| balozi wrote:
| Often people are fired because the higher-ups simply just don't
| want to deal with them anymore. Although the guy's claims could
| be credible, his firing could come down to other factors. Maybe
| he communicated his concerns the wrong way. Maybe he misread the
| politics of the situation.
|
| In the end most people just want to get paid and go home to their
| family. If they think you're making work things harder for them,
| they will get rid of you if they can.
| rvz wrote:
| Ah yes. The Silicon Valley fake-it-until-you-make-it scam which
| is borderline fraud that has been taken to the extreme to the
| point where it is fine until a whistleblower calls it out and
| gets kicked out of the company.
|
| Only in Silicon Valley fraudulent wild claims and deceptive
| advertising is perfectly fine to get away with in order to
| inflate company valuations and to over-hype and grift to the
| general public.
|
| AI is going to certainly be the next 'fake-it-until-you-make-it'
| grift for so-called repackaged LLM startups seeking funding from
| gullible VCs.
| mathattack wrote:
| Our old Salesforce rep is now a LinkedIn influencer. We all shake
| our heads as we know how useless they really were.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Well, what has changed?
| mushbino wrote:
| Standard practice in tech, especially enterprise. I've had to
| create all kinds of vaporware over the years that was passed off
| as real. Not something I've ever felt good about, but I would
| like to be able to pay rent. I hate it.
| wslh wrote:
| Is this basically a typical SEO practice?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Now, consider all of those companies that are building their
| solutions _on top_ of salesforce 's products.
|
| We had a customer go with a competitor who is partnered with
| Salesforce and the only thought I could summon was "I can't wait
| to read the postmortem".
|
| Even if you can make it work, the user experience is a big factor
| and will ultimately become a system requirement at some level.
| Latency is hell and requires mastery to overcome in any system of
| meaningful complexity. Focused, targeted engineering vs broad-
| spectrum tool spam is the difference between 10 and 1000
| milliseconds.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I am still waiting to find a software or hardware vendor that
| does not lie about their capabilities, that seems to be normal
| industry standard and not news worthy
| whartung wrote:
| Well, we didn't. We sold accounting and distribution systems.
| The base software was functional, but basic and pretty much
| always needed customization. So, we sold a lot of "we can do
| that" features that we didn't already have, confident that we
| could, indeed, "do that". And we did.
|
| There was, however, one rather spectacular disaster where the
| client bought really underpowered hardware for their needs. The
| vendor promised a more powerful machine "real soon now", but
| the one they had just wasn't cutting the mustard. They ended
| buying something much more capable from a different vendor, and
| then the lawsuits started happening about who said what where.
| We got dragged into that, but were exonerated.
|
| Like anyone else in software, we were cocky developers, and we
| could do pretty much anything they threw at us. And I'm
| certainly not going to suggest we never missed a deadline, we
| all know better than that. But we knew our software and knew
| whatever it couldn't do, we could make it do satisfactorily for
| the client. I was both developer and pre-sale tech that helped
| keep the sales guy in line.
|
| We had one client back out because we gave them, like, a 3 week
| schedule for a feature. "We talked to our guy and he said
| that's impossible." "Impossible? Really?" From some fellow who
| legitimately had no idea what he was talking about. We ended up
| demonstrating that we could do the feature, in their office, in
| a couple of hours to rough out the fundamentals, and they were
| rather impressed.
|
| Unfortunately, we got them as a client. Very toxic
| personalities, not fun to work with. But, we were hungry,
| them's the breaks. The others at the office enjoyed my
| manifestations of the assorted horrible tragedies I wished upon
| these people and their families when I returned from a visit.
| Really awful.
| macintux wrote:
| One client company was so toxic I ended up seeking
| counseling. Service providers should be more willing to fire
| clients.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Diagrams.net has been my diamond in the ruff. Small software
| dev who makes one of the best diagramming softwares I have ever
| used. It's very intuitive for tech and science people, makes
| handsome diagrams/workflow/etc., And it's not trying to be a
| billion dollar company, just a sustainable one.
| coldcode wrote:
| I worked at a consulting firm (dot com era) with a sales person
| who told me his job was to lie to customers, and that my job
| (programmer) was to make him look good. At least he was
| truthful...
| jimmychoozyx wrote:
| All industry has a degree of foul play, including government
| corruption, fraud, bribery & money laundering. It varies by
| industry and geography.
|
| I worked at a company recently who made claims about products
| having AI, and then I spoke with a data scientist who confirmed
| that the products do not have AI capabilities-- even basic
| statistical modeling or prediction.
|
| I suspect an astonishing proportion of businesses lie to a
| certain degree, on the sales, marketing, and management side of
| things.
| lucidone wrote:
| Doesn't surprise me given Salesforce is all about squeezing their
| (generally) non-technical customers with arbitrary licensing
| restrictions and "best practices" that lead to paying for more
| and more.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Someone makes it to VP and then all of a sudden decides to have a
| conscience.
| tantalor wrote:
| This is basic product-market fit. Don't sell the product unless
| you have a market to sell it to. That means marketing something
| you don't have, but can build.
| kbos87 wrote:
| This just reads like a disgruntled former employee grasping at
| straws. The advertised capabilities of enterprise software (just
| like every other product) should be assumed to be under best case
| circumstances, and there's typically a period of due diligence
| where both sides work to understand whether or not the vendor can
| match the customers' expectations in the context of the use cases
| they have planned.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of SFDC, but this is enterprise software
| buying 101.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| One word: Siebel
| trollied wrote:
| Oh my, I'd forgotten about that. Thankfully.
|
| Is it still around?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Bought by Oracle, still being sold.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Many Salesforce employees are Siebel alums.
| gemanor wrote:
| Sure, if you need 10ms rate, just spin up another instances. I
| personally prefer cloud product with lies here and there than
| pay so much.
| newobj wrote:
| How on earth did this person make it to VP of PM
| x86x87 wrote:
| Title inflation.
|
| Guess how many VPs Salesforce has.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine
| the meaning of 'real-time'
|
| I've always enjoyed the fact that SEPA Instant, the small-volume
| low-latency version of the eurozone bank transfer system, defines
| 'instant' as, in practice, 20 seconds.
|
| The UK went with slightly more conservative naming for their one,
| Faster Payments (in fairness, it also has much looser tail
| latency requirements).
| bitwize wrote:
| I've long observed that there's actual real-time and there's
| marketroid real-time. Actual real-time has hard, typically small
| (milliseconds or smaller) timing windows that must be hit.
| Marketroid real-time generally means "faster and more responsive
| than previous batch-based processes" and can mean a response
| within seconds or a response within days.
|
| When marketroids come up to you talking about real-time this or
| real-time that, it's best to not quibble about definitions. They
| live in their bubble and consider it rude to disturb them with
| technical realities.
| davesque wrote:
| I really have no idea why this story is getting so much traction.
|
| For one thing, there is often not a clear distinction between so
| called "real time" analytics processing and batch processing. For
| example, it doesn't seem unethical to me to develop a system that
| processes in smaller batches and call it "real time." Even if the
| batch processing took hours. For some customers, that might very
| well feel like real time.
|
| Second, it is standard practice (especially with enterprise
| software companies) to fudge the use of certain terminology for
| the sake of marketing. Again, I think this is because the meaning
| of those terms is often subjective as I think it is in this case.
|
| Just doesn't feel like there's a real scandal here.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Because it's Salesforce and people love schadenfreude,
| especially when it's inflicted on a villain. And Salesforce
| isn't exactly well loved in the industry.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Honestly, after reading his complaint (https://storage.courtliste
| ner.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259...), I'm not at all
| sympathetic. He got acquihired into a senior role after 10 years
| as CEO of his startup, ended up overseeing another team's real-
| time efforts, and by his own account went absolutely nuclear when
| they didn't agree with him about what "real-time" meant. If he
| made any efforts whatsoever to _resolve_ the disagreement before
| going around and complaining to other executives about his team,
| he doesn 't mention it.
|
| This sounds very much to me like a story of a power-tripping ex-
| CEO whose technical knowledge is not as strong as he'd like to
| think.
| version_five wrote:
| I can't tell from far article and comments if this is a case of
| the company lying or the executive taking aspirational statements
| too literally. Though I'd expect if he's at that level he would
| understand the difference, ie only make a big deal out of it if
| it really was lying. The lawsuit also claimed
| that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time,'
| so that it could falsely claim that the CDP operated in real-
| time."
|
| This sounds credible though. Not anything Salesforce specific,
| just seems to be the new industry playbook, redefine already
| popular terms to suit what you want *cough* open source *cough*
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| I'd bet money this VP hoped he'd get retaliated against so he
| could file a lawsuit and get some easy cash from a company with
| enough of it to pay him off.
|
| He works at Salesforce, what did he expect exactly.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Especially with terms like "real-time" that aren't tremendously
| well-defined in the first place. 100% of real-time systems I've
| seen in production defer some amount of work to out-of-band
| batches. In payments even parts of the critical path are
| reconciled once a day!
| HenryBemis wrote:
| But many banks' transactions do run/are realized in the end
| of the day. This is why (in vast majority, if not all banks)
| money that is deposited "today" are available "tomorrow".
| calibas wrote:
| VP: Let's stop committing fraud.
|
| Salesforce: It's not fraud if we redefine 'real-time'. Also,
| you're fired.
| fidotron wrote:
| This is an inevitable aspect of the MVP fake-it-until-you-make-it
| culture that infects even established companies. They are telling
| themselves that if enough people come to depend on it doing what
| they claim it does then they'll make it do that, but not before.
|
| I've encountered people making surprised Pikachu faces when
| called on problems with their systems while they roll out a new
| version that fixes it and claim incidents never occurred.
| Appearances are everything in tech today.
| dbish wrote:
| This is pushed from the smallest startup upwards as a way to
| make sure you're building something people want. There are pros
| and cons of course, but I can understand why companies do this
| and why software folks think they need to. It's related to the
| shipping early, fast, and iterating which is the currently
| taught best practice by places that have a lot of experience
| getting new things off the ground like YC.
| fidotron wrote:
| But there's a world of difference about lying about
| capability today and working with customers to deliver what
| they need.
|
| My favourite example is how ARM ended up in Nokia phones.
| They had a 32 bit RISC CPU core which met the performance
| requirements but Nokia turned them down due to the memory
| density of the instructions meaning it required more
| expensive storage than their existing solutions. On the way
| back from the meeting they came up with the idea of Thumb,
| worked out how to do it, did it, and Nokia bought it. It then
| took over the industry.
|
| That conversation in SV today would involve Nokia going "We
| love what you folks are doing" but just keeping the existing
| system without ever saying why, and nothing would improve.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's about to be multiplied several times over with AI startups
| promising the moon and the stars and handwaving away criticisms
| with anthropomorphized terms like "hallucinations".
| browningstreet wrote:
| At two companies I've been the CTO at we brought Salesforce in to
| pitch us. They couldn't actually tell us what their use case was
| given our sales and customer base. We had ecom platforms with
| some customer data embedded in the sales platform and Salesforce
| couldn't pitch a benefit to using their system.
| kbos87 wrote:
| If you are looking for _them_ to tell _you_ what the use case
| is, that isn 't a great sign of need or commitment, and they
| likely aren't going to take you very seriously.
| zulban wrote:
| Maybe they sent you the noob team for practice because they
| didn't think you were a big enough lead.
| archo wrote:
| https://archive.is/kkVvi
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| dpeck wrote:
| The same could be said for nearly every sales call that I've been
| on the receiving end of.
|
| It doesn't make it "right", but (nearly?) everyone who is
| involved in these conversations on both the buyer and seller
| sides of it knows that at best it's aspirational capabilities
| that are being pitched and purchased. Usually it's pretty far
| from that.
| MontgomeryPy wrote:
| Yes. So maybe this lawsuit could move the pendulum back from
| the truthiness state. I see a lot of 'so what' comments but
| maybe there's a better way.
| liquidpele wrote:
| It won't move back. These issues exist for reasons, and
| avoiding lawsuits is already a consideration taken. At the
| end of the day, they embellish to an extreme because
| management in the customer companies are usually buying "we
| used X" prestige and there's very little accountability in
| management for such mistakes.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'd sort of split this up a bit. The engineers seem to know
| that the promises from sales are lie. The managers and
| executives sort of claim to know that salesmen exaggerate
| claims, but the reality of it never really seems to land. Time
| and time again I'm working for a company who has purchased a
| product which they're barely making use or, or are flat out
| using incorrectly because they were charmed by the promises
| from sales, but not so charmed as to actually staff the
| software properly to ensure it is well configured, and
| maintained correctly.
| gemanor wrote:
| IMO the main problem is the ecosystem around Salesforce. If you
| are the end user it is (not) ok to have latency lies, but
| you'll be the only one who feel it. If you aim to other
| developers build services on top of your product, your latency
| issues has exponential effect for them.
| itronitron wrote:
| I was talking with a colleague once about this and they
| mentioned that as long as everyone being pitched was wearing a
| suit then they wouldn't worry about the wild claims the sales
| people made about our software. But if there was an engineer in
| the room they'd feel obligated to nudge everyone back to
| reality.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Three red lines
| moneywoes wrote:
| Sorry can you elaborate
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It's from the satirical video "The Expert"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg). It's up
| there with the "Microservices" Krazam video.
| gregw2 wrote:
| Funny! Thanks
| shostack wrote:
| I'm a technical marketer who had owned a lot of the
| associated infra over my career. I've historically been a
| major target for sales people from companies in the space.
|
| I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright
| lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work,
| particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I
| care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with.
|
| These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a
| competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person
| on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even
| really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the
| decision maker, I have very specific technical and product
| questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party
| by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm
| you can have XYZ people on our first call."
|
| Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me
| around with those people being unavailable at the last
| minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their
| calendars in order.
|
| This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm
| not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my
| homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in
| advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and
| their company, this can also be an express path to getting
| executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the
| process and get some good terms for me.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I'm surprised to not find the "well technically, it does process
| in milliseconds" argument here. Many many milliseconds
| [deleted]
| alberth wrote:
| Puffery
|
| Off topic: in many industry's, like CPG, puffery is a very common
| marketing practice. Eg "Best Cookies in America"
|
| It seems puffery in tech is way less common.
|
| Is there a reason why?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-13 23:01 UTC)