As you move up the food chain, the distance between the people you answer to and the source of the money they are spending grows, personal attachment to the outcome diminishes, and you get a lot less meddling. It’s one of the main reasons our team turns away very small customers.

Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450575

Points: 154

# Comments: 92

This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

I have big reservations about ‘smart home’ stuff, and it’s only the second such device in our house. But I’m clearly losing that battle, and will be looking into some ways to mitigate the privacy concerns. But gosh, it sure is nice to pick from a gazillion light patterns.

This was in Canada, ~1990. Awhile ago admittedly, but I haven’t looked at travelling fair rides the same way since.

They hadn’t even fired it up. The review was, as far as we could tell, entirely fabricated. We brought this to the editorial team’s attention. They responded by adding a few points to our scores.

> tact is simply a form of dishonesty

Maybe it is, but our primate brains tend to get very attached to our ideas and opinions. People aren't rational. Tactfulness is one way to get the other side to see your argument without making them feel threatened. Is it manipulative? Sure. But in many cases it's the only path that will get results.

It’s worth getting checked out. I ended up going the dental appliance route because CPAP machines feel like a torture device to me. Anecdotally it’s made a noticeable difference. Haven’t had a nap in ages.

Agreed. I tried for ~3 years to sell ‘general development services’. Got tangled up in mobile apps, SharePoint, web development, basically anything that I didn’t consider to be “IT”.

It was a financial and professional disaster. The solutions all sucked, because I didn’t have deep expertise in anything and there was never enough budget to “do things right”. There was no opportunity to develop any kind of reputation for anything. It is insanely hard to sell “well, I can build things”.

As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed. I started getting good at it, margins became healthy, referrals started to happen. Try getting a referral when the problems you solve are too vague to describe.

> There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.

If there’s a market for CTO-as-a-service, or anything really, you need to be able to reach it. A hyper niche service can be OK if you can reach the people that need it. Broad markets can be just as hard because you tend to need to reach lots of people (think advertising). For me, the sweet spot turned out to be “small to mid-size regional companies” because you can identify them and sell to them as a freelancer.