I entered 'Sudbury, MA' --> NOK, 'Sudbury' validates to 'Greater Sudbury (CA)', 'Sudbury (MA)' --> NOK. Tried with a neighboring city in Massachusetts, 'Concord' --> Validates as fine but given the experience with Sudbury, it isn't obvious which of the ~35 Concords that there are in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord).
It's not too terribly difficult to load test Snowflake to get a sense of scaling. Jmeter does the job well. Heck I can pass you along some sample projects I've done against them if you really wanted.
> Meta point: do we have to accept deception as a necessary part of sales? It seems strange that we accept deception and manipulation as necessary ingredients in the market, and that its on the buyer when they "get duped".
I guess I would clarify what you mean by deception. One of the key parts of sales, at least when it comes to technical sales, is that an answer to a question or a presentation of capabilities needs to be made in a context. You have to know your audience. When you're talking about how your software does authentication it's absolutely appropriate to describe it as "integrating into your existing investments in authentication" when speaking to the business side of the audience. This is compared to going into detail (e.g. NTLM, Basic, SAML, Kerberos, OIDC, JWT, whatever) when speaking to the technical side of the audience. Is the generic answer to the business side deceptive? I don't see how it is. It's not their role to analyze the technical merits. They just want to know how much extra work will it require, in general, to deploy the software.
Is outright lying necessary? No. I've only been on the sales (technical sales, but nonetheless sales) side of the world for 1.5 years, but no, you don't. I am fortunate that my manager has carved out a team where the _expectation_ is that we are technical stewards of our customers. Obviously our end goal is selling software, but the immediate goal is to make the software work. It's a norm on our team that it's entirely acceptable to join a call and tell the customer that a competitor would be better suited for the use case.
While it's not necessary, it is hard. The incentives for sales aren't aligned with telling the truth. But this is where culture matters quite a bit.
Maybe other support organizations are different or maybe I am busier than normal, but the concept of one thing at a time is foreign to me.
To outline today:
Left comments on ~15 net new cases to jump start the troubleshooting by the technicians assigned to them
Help led a morning meeting reviewing cases where people are stuck
Researched whether an old (7y) version of the software had a piece of functionality
Made comments helping ~5 different technicians globally on their cases
Helped a colleague craft a SQL query to help replicate an issue then talked over strategy
Logged into a colleagues VM where they had an install problem
Had a call with the pre-sales brass about trends in the support organization
2 walk ups:
- Intermittent reload issue when triggering things via API
- How to setup a reverse proxy with IIS
Assigned cases for initial responses to meet our contractual obligations
- Left 5-10 public facing comments to meet SLA to assist the team
Emailed some devs about whether a customer can run using the latest version of the database which underpins our software
Responded to 3-4 different issues in the Slack for our Consultants on-site with customers
Came up with a PowerShell script to work around a bug for another tech at the behest of our Escalations folks who walked up
Caught up on a case that I'll be covering for next week which has Executive VP visibility (ultimately making things right after the initial tech botched a system)
Personal cases:
- Install problem on a server with FIPS
-- Then get thrown under the bus on a customer facing email about the further issues
-- After bypassing that there was a user rights assignment problem; emailed some devs about why we require it / work-arounds for a locked down government server
- Reload of data problem due to the permissions for the service account
-- On the call discussed:
--- Architecting for high availability
--- Long-term maintenance activity to ensure stability
- Reviewed 2GB of logs for an intermittent issue
- Worked on reproducing a client side bug
- Called / left voicemails / sent emails for 3 customers trying to get a remote session scheduled
- Alleged security vulnerability. Called / emailed the customer asking for more clarity; stood up servers to reproduce and researched how to capture the data needed to confirm
All while constantly monitoring email / 3 slack instances / 1 Microsoft team instance / my queue for fires to put out
In some sense, that's a slew of single things, but it's uncommon for me not to be moving onto the next task as I am winding down the previous one. Nor is the work-flow all in the same vein.
I am some random person on the internet, so caveat emptor. That being said, my girlfriend has a family friend who works in health research. Since she was looking for a new job in roughly the same field, she reached out and exchanged a few emails, had coffee. Normal networking stuff. One of the projects that the family friend was involved with was doing concussion research for the NFL in the aftermath of the PBS's League Denial, and Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru's work more generally.
Fast forward a few months after the exchanges, she was included on an email from that family friend where the they complained that they should've known better to work on this research and that they were enraged that the conclusions were being suppressed / minimized.
I entered 'Sudbury, MA' --> NOK, 'Sudbury' validates to 'Greater Sudbury (CA)', 'Sudbury (MA)' --> NOK. Tried with a neighboring city in Massachusetts, 'Concord' --> Validates as fine but given the experience with Sudbury, it isn't obvious which of the ~35 Concords that there are in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord).
I'm guessing this is scoped to just California?