I just read Joel’s latest article on Set Your Priorities.
The first part reminded me of one of the reasons I disliked working at ATR. Building features for single customers. Our best success came from building products that where applicable to a large number of situations. His 13 steps to personal hell I thought were well written with the later summary hitting the mark (for me)
“in fact what you’re really doing is letting your sales force pimp out your developers with the sole goal of maximizing their personal commissions.”
This pretty much sums up my feeling from ATR. The sales guys were blinded by the dollars and failed to consider they were just been used as leverage to lower Cisco’s price.
So thank you Joel for finding the words for some of my past unhappiness.