Stomp

There is a bit of an uptick in the optimism meter at work since the return from holidays. At the macro-level, the financial outlook for The Mothership continue to be relatively strong. Closer to home, The Long One is almost ready to come out of the oven and RTM – which means hopefully some new opportunities for Your Faithful Servant on the next release of Whatever-We-Are-Calling-The-Product-This-Week.

Most importantly it seems that the Product-Formerly-Known-As-Pittsburgh is actually something that folks might, egad, actually want to buy and deploy. Our Sales teams closed on a couple of big software/services deals in January with some very large customers whose names you would recognize, but that I can’t divulge (remember the BCG).

It is a simple reality that if a product doesn’t sell and satisfy its financial targets, eventually the company will no longer desire to pay that product’s software engineers. We did not have a good year last year, but are off to a better start in the new year. Everybody’s eyes are wide open, however. In this industry and this company, all of us are just a couple of bad financial quarters away from getting kicked to the curb. You take it a year at a time and count down the months until the mortgage is paid off (2016).

By the time any email announcing a big competitive sales win gets to the worker bees, it has followed a path up and down the Sales and Product Development organizational hierarchies. The emails usually start from the customer Account Team that actually closed on the business – some of these are commissioned folks that will be able to book expensive vacations or buy a new Escalade based on the sale. (I might be exaggerating just a bit there but more power to ‘em though.) The email will then travel up the Sales Organization chain to their VPs and then across to the Product Development VPs, who will buck it the whole way down until the code monkeys get copied.

At every hop in this email chain, the various managers apparently all feel obligated to type a couple of lines of their own congratulations. Almost always some variation of one or more of the following:

• Way to go team!
• This shows what we can do when we all team together!
• This was a total team effort among Sales, Services, and Development!
• Let’s keep the momentum going team!

You get the idea. I am wondering why, on the emails disclosing the big competitive losses, we don’t seem to see anywhere near the same quantity of team references? Just an observation.

So on an email highlighting one of these January wins, one of the Sales VPs just couldn’t contain his emotion:

Team, we had a fantastic win yesterday at ____.  Heads up vs Service Now, HP and BMC Remedy.  Fierce competition.  We used our new code that is nearing release to stomp our competitors.

Fully understand where the dude is coming from - it is the nature of sales: stuff like the thrill of victory, competition, the winner-take-all nature of it, the fact that you are fired if you don’t make your numbers. This guy sounds like he is ready to pad up, take some special teams reps, and bust the wedge on a kickoff return. I can see the spit coming out of his mouth like The Chin.

When I read that, I LMFAO. Couldn’t get this absurd image out of my mind. Imagined a bunch of developers from RTP and Austin going out to San Diego or Palo Alto, throwing down with another set of geeks, and then dropping our ISO DVDs on their crumpled-up carcasses after we beat the crap out of them. SEWA. Software Engineers With Attitude.