<story><title>The salesman and the developer</title><url>http://swombat.com/2012/5/11/salesman-developer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>babarock</author><text>Completely off topic (or is it?) I find myself being quickly turned off by all these blogposts which &apos;casually&apos; mention Steve Jobs on every single occasion the author comes across. Taken individually, each of these articles (like this one) would have a prefectly defendable reason to mention it. I&apos;m annoyed with the trend.&lt;p&gt;I have mentioned this issue before in other comments threads on HN. Am I the only one annoyed by that? Yes Steve Jobs was a beloved public figure and an outstanding entrepreneur, but mentioning his name (&quot;casually&quot;) won&apos;t add value to just any blog post. Unless I&apos;m reading something written by an official biographer, or any other expert on the matter, I don&apos;t like reading Jobs name in a completely unrelated articles.&lt;p&gt;So this is my plea for bloggers: Stop doing that. Stop mentionning &apos;tech startup&apos; celebrities in your posts; in my view it dillutes your point instead of adding anything to it. For the record, I&apos;m reacting to the mention of Jobs&apos; name because it&apos;s the trend of the moment, just like Zuckerberg&apos;s was a few years back. It&apos;s the celeb name dropping that bothers me, not the work of Steve Jobs.&lt;p&gt;Also, I apologize for the harsh tone. I really enjoyed reading everything else in the article and felt that it presented a serious miscommunication issue between builders and sales people in an otherwise very straight-to-the point yet witty and amusing fashion. Good post!</text></comment>
<story><title>The salesman and the developer</title><url>http://swombat.com/2012/5/11/salesman-developer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>marcusf</author><text>The main problem is when you&apos;re going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it&apos;s a an antler, that you can&apos;t kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again.&lt;p&gt;Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you&apos;re solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They&apos;re completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I&apos;ve usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don&apos;t wreak unnecessary havoc on it.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>