Coding is kind of like being a wizard. Like, y’all put a bunch of nonsense in just precisely the right order and then some electrictrified minerals bounce around and then a sandwich shows up at my door.
If the process was almost any amount sexier we would absolutely not let half the people running tech startups near it for -gestures broadly- obvious reasons.
The scummy sales person is a stereotype. They exist sure but if you’ve ever worked with a good one they can really help particularly if you’re buying something complex. I used to work for a company that sold complex manufacturing equipment and without a salesperson theres no way most customers would know what they needed to maintain it etc.
As an engineer i hate both, technical sales never have an understanding of their product and are never able to answer any of my questions (because i’ve read through the datasheet as their words are meaningless to me) but they are mooooorrrreee than happy to schedule an in person meeting to come to my office and show me their product line.
Tell me what i want to know or find me someone who can, im not going to buy 10,000 of whetever if i cant even determine if they will work for my use case.
The last time i had to deal with one of these assholes it took 3 phone calls and 2 emails to get a simple answer which wasnt in their datasheet, which was all of one page long.
My favorite experience with technical sales is we had these component guys come in, they had openned up our product and wanted to show how much better their “equivalent” components were (genuinely a great idea), but they had no context as to what the components were being used for so they all fell flat.
In my experience both are only a waste of my time.
It’s been my experience as well, especially in the web space (I’m not a web person), but everywhere else too.
Sometimes I like to chat up sales people if I must, just to see if I get anything interesting out of them, but usually I end up annoyed and bored at their hustle because they’re just saying whatever they think I want to hear, and don’t really know anything of substance about what they’re pushing.
When my dad and uncle wanted a website done and thought I could do it (again, not a web person) because I was their “computer guy”, we ended up trying one of those “Let our expert team get you going!” services pushed by a hoster. (Fatcow, in this case, may they burn if they’re still around.)
The sales guy had us thinking we’d be in business sooner than later. They’d have it handled. They were pros. Awesome! I could learn a little bit about managing all this while they’d get my non-technical family set up with the hard parts to start their venture.
…The result was a lackluster, barebones Wordpress site. There was no consulting or advice, no educating about how the web worked or how things are usually done. Weird hacky custom code for everything from video uploading to payment processing.
Zero design went into this and the best part of it was the logo, which my uncle hired a freelancing college student to do.
All my family got was some number that connected to a very annoyed team in India who just wanted to connect your request to whatever was closest on their menu and charge you a few hundred up front for it. They just assumed you knew exactly what you wanted and would bill by the hour to write some ugly custom JavaScript / PHP. (Man, if they just implemented existing plugins it would have been better…)
They wanted to charge a ridiculous fee for adding an SSL, and basically shrugged me off when I called to ask how to do it myself, after we all agreed this was for an e-commerce purpose in the first place.
The website never truly went live, they got a lot of money, and the only $20 we “made” was from testing the checkout function.
The consequences of this are why, to this day, I just teach myself enough to do whatever it is I want to do. The only difference between a good salesman and a bad one, is that the “good ones” are simply clever enough to evade your bullshit detector.
The whole game is to make you think you’re hiring some friendly pro who’s got it all covered, but in the end you were better off doing it yourself anyway.
I was a naive teenager who lacked ability, just trying to help out my family. I still feel guilty to this day.
My dad asked me if I could build a site for him. I tried, but ultimately didn’t have the chops (I can customize Wordpress, but this was supposed to be from scratch and I didn’t keep up when things like CSS came into being; old). I sent him to hire an outside party.
Here’s the thing: he wanted his menus vertical on the left side. I told him that’s not how it should be done; they should be at the top. But he was adamant. Later, he told me that his web consultant shop had also said the same. It’s the only time he ever said, “you were right,” about anything like in my entire life. Not that he was an asshole (though he really was when I was growing up). It’s just not something he said. And no one can take that from me. I even called my mom and told her.
Still, happy for you that your dad could humble himself to you. That’s really hard for some people, even when they’d like to, it’s like your brain just won’t compute how to say it without coming out wrong so you never say it.
I’m looking at a page right now that has some buttons for “Subscribe, Create a post, Block community” on the side. But I guess it’s on the right side and maybe since they’re buttons it doesn’t count as a menu.
We have only 1080px in vertical, part of which is also used for Taskbars, titlebars and toolbars in most cases. Then there is this trend of sites not using most of the horizontal space for main body text.
So, what reason do we have to not use the wasted side-space and instead congest the already low vertical space?
I would understand if it were a mobile-only site or if you were explicitly talking about the vertical version of it, but even for 4:3, I won’t consider a sidebar to be a bad idea, unless perhaps, it was German.
Your dad is right. On desktop, navigation is on the left. On tablet, you shrink it to a rail. On mobile it should be a dismissible nav drawer.
The top menus, especially the flyover(on mouse hover), are bad for accessibility because they convert a non-committal action (hover) to a context changing one (focus). It’s a uniquely web-only invention and thankfully falling out of usage. (Unless you mean menubar/toolbar. Those are fine but extremely rare on Web.)
I mean you’re not wrong but I’d argue you can get more interesting cve’s using a higher more performant language such as c++. Where there are are ways to include CVE 's from C and introduce new ones to each level of your program using inheritance.
Here is the thing. Everybody, including attackers, is too overwhelmed with the boring variety of CVEs and unable to even think about the more interesting kind.
As soon as we make people stop generating those boring ones by the millions, our days will be way more interesting while we find and fix more complex CVEs. But anyway, those will also be way more common on C and C++ code than most other languages (maybe with an exception for JS).
EDIT: Oh, nevermind. I’ve forgotten that it’s using CVSS, which has a tendency to really overestimate the risk, so almost everyting is CCVE according to them :D
Got it. Animated background, GIFs, HTML 4.01 frames, marquee, privacy-friendly ads which are just GIFs linking to other websites. Did I go too far with the last one?
Stuff like this is part of why I dropped out of multimedia production in college, I only enjoy that stuff as a hobby for myself, doing it for other people is a creative nightmare lol
Some decade and change ago I used to sell people Drupal installs at £200 a pop. They’d get a pretty secure codebase, the ability to add content through a gui and if necessary have customer accounts.
Pretty much what killed it as a business was everyone expected to be on the first page of Google because business advisers were telling them that sitebuilders should do SEO as standard.
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