On the other hand I have worked with team mates that just don't communicate what they are doing.
I always got the feeling that they either don't do anything at all or work on things that are completely irrelevant.
Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people.
Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine.
A tangent but i believe all pricing should public information by law above some threshold to battle corruption, nepotism, cartel making and monopolies.
I've seen too many governments and even medium sized companies paying absurd amounts to some shitty locked in cloud platform with lots of better alternatives, because someone got kickbacks, gifts, vacations or a seat on some board, and everyone should be more enraged.
The EU has tried to battle this with various public procurement processes but it's a big clown show of course so i don't know what the solution is.
Unless there's absolutely no alternative, and it's something I desperately need, I basically won't buy anything that says "call for pricing" or some such, because I interpret that as "call so one of our trained liars (i.e., salesmen) can figure out how hard we can screw you".
In many cases I'd even pay a premium to avoid talking to one of those people.
You're not the target market, the CTO, CIO, or business development representatives are. So many developers say they won't ever buy "call for pricing" software, like, yeah, they know you won't, in fact that's what they bank on.
And the execs won’t really worry about "how hard the salesmen can screw them", they know the rules of the game and understand that negotiations are negotiations. It’s a negotiator’s job to try to get a good deal, and that works both ways.
Yes. Devs who don't know sales are obviously not their demographic, they'll be speaking to layers of other biz dev people before they even get to the execs, and each one knows exactly how to extract concessions and discounts, and the opposing salesperson knows exactly how much of a discount they can give. In this way, it is much more of an efficient market than most devs think.
Devs' reaction to all this is honestly the same as when a non-technical exec tells a dev why they "can't just get it done in a day, it shouldn't be that hard right?" People have their own competencies and are usually blind to others'.
I own the business and I buy stuff all the time, just not from places that say "call for pricing".
I've got too many other things going on to waste time listening to some lame pitch from a guy who was probably selling shoes last week.
If they don't want to sell me stuff because I'm "not their target market", that's fine with me.
I'll buy it elsewhere.
I'm not sure what crazoid B-school theory says that you should make it harder for customers to buy your stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's a really bad theory.
You are continuing to show exactly why you're not the target market. Those "call for pricing" companies are targeting large enterprises, not one person owned businesses. That you self select out of their market is exactly what they want. And yes, sometimes companies do make it harder to buy stuff simply because they can make more money and save on customer support and other operational costs if they have a few large companies paying them millions over having many smaller ones paying thousands.
> You are continuing to show exactly why you're not the target market.
You're continuing to justify the role of salesmen, which is an essentially parasitic role that results in higher prices for everyone.
If my company should get big enough that I have to hire someone to order stuff, I don't want that person wasting time on the phone with salesmen either. Every minute he spends on the phone listening to a sales pitch is a minute he's not actually doing the job I'm paying him for.
Okay, it is clear you've never done sales in your life. Even for the products I make I still have to do sales to convince bigger clients to buy them. If you don't like the game, don't play it, but don't think you're somehow above the game. I will point you to another comment I made regarding the arrogance of developers sometimes when it comes to other disciplines and thinking that others are somehow stupider than themselves [0]. Regardless, I don't think this conversation will yield more productive insights. Goodbye.
> Okay, it is clear you've never done sales in your life.
What was your first clue? The fact that I consider salesmen to be parasites?
>If you don't like the game, don't play it, but don't think you're somehow above the game.
Oh, I am totally above the game, because I will not talk to you or your fellow salesmen. I will not call you. Ever. If you cold-call me, I'll hang up and block your number. If you show up in person, you'll be asked to leave and informed that any future visits will be considered trespass and result in a call to the towing company to have your car removed and a call to the police to have you removed.
I thought that was made clear.
Is this what you call "negotiation"? Because you suck at it, dude. srsly.
You are in the business of conning people into paying a higher price for goods and services for which they would otherwise have paid less. Every penny of your commission is ripped right out of the customer's pocket, for zero value added.
It depends on how large the institution is and how high up you are. At smaller institutions, C-level execs absolutely talk to sales, I've sold products to them myself.
Yeah on multiple occasions I've e-mailed said businesses and said "This other business has it for $X. Beat that and I'll buy yours. I don't have time for a call."
I want products at my doorstep in exchange for $. I don't want a goddamn coffee chat.
I specialize in costing/pricing, not in saas however. There are a lot of reasons why what you are asking for is likely not realistic. It unfortunately does get abused, though, and I fully agree with how bullshit some of the arrangements are. It's just the people taking advantage of the situation are doing so knowing that the "cover" for it is legitimate.
Maybe there are ways to address the abuse without forcing upfront pricing?
Cost/pricing is similar enough to a salary, why is it not realistic to have these costs front facing? I can't see anything positive from the consumer perspective with hiding the numbers. The business side, there is always a reason to hide things.
I think demanding upfront pricing could hurt the customer. The company would be forced to overestimate their costs to cover the risk associated with unknown use-case details, making the enterprise price inflated. There would be a big "**" next to the price as well with a long list of conditions that need to be met.
The true costs are not front facing because it may not be clear which part of your product is going to be bearing most of the weight of the enterprise customers use-case until you know exactly what they are buying. Your costs may change a lot based on the nature and scale of what they are buying.
For example, you may be rate limited on a background service they use and the customer usecase will likely pish you over your limit. the next product tier from the background service vendor that's required to fulfill the enterprise company's use-case may cost way more and offer way more capacity than that company is going to use by itself. So you have to make a bet on how much cost to assign to that customer, and how much to assign to other/future customers given you buy that new tier and use it to change what you offer to other customers to try to make use of it. It may lower your cost overall if it supports a feature you can upsell relatively easily. Or it may be a service hardly used at all andyou really can't justify going up to that next tier unless this one enterprise customer pays for nearly all of the added cost
I fully agree, or at the VERY LEAST pricing information should be disclosable and any NDA around pricing should be automatically void and unenforceable.
How the hell do I know they're not giving me higher prices due to racial profiling or some other unethical reason?
That would allow, at least, some sort of website or chrome plugin to exist that fetches and displays previously-submitted pricing information as an overlay next to any idiotic "call for pricing" statements.
That is the way I would run a country if I was its president.
64GB is not GPU RAM, but system RAM. Consumer GPUs have 24GB at most, those with good value/price have way less. Current generation workstation GPUs are unaffordable; used can be found on ebay for a reasonable price, but they are quite slow. DDR5 RAM might be a better investment.
Hard agree with this - sometimes find myself typing out a well-intentioned response, but then cancelling because of the potential downside years in the future for some anodyne opinion held today. Not to mention Roko's Basilisk (all hail the benevolent AI! :)
Not sure but I think it will be more focused on offline life instead. AI and enshittification will make the internet and the core error in its monetization based on ads so bad that it will be replaced by a much smaller and more private version.
And the enshitification begins.
Remember that you as users are next.
Find a sustainable alternative now.
I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.
What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1].
For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal.
Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills.
I hardly ever listen to metal any more but I still often check Angry Metal Guy just because it's such a well run independent music review and community site.
Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.
Probably some dark pattern where they hide the actual price for just youtube music and show you the subscription for a bundle of services you don't want...
It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.
Get a job at a restaurant/ supermarket/bar - something basic, boring and manual.
At least for a year or so, you will have a very different experience.
Work 6-8 hours, then clock out and meet some people.
Sounds dumb but IMO you should dial it back and ground yourself a bit more - friends you make a that age often stay for life.
It's harder after.
Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people.
Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine.
Everything else is kindergarten.