Rebellion at DataRobot over insider stock sales
This is a side point to the article, but but important for anyone running an enterprise business:<p>> The article brought attention to other things not going right at the company. For example, DataRobot sent its top salespeople on a lavish trip to The Virgin Islands just days before laying off 7% of employees.<p>This trip is not necessarily a bad thing to have done, and more likely than not a <i>good</i> thing.  You need your sales team properly motivated.<p>Sales people have their own culture, and if you don't understand it you'll have a hard time recruiting and retaining an effective sales team.  Actually you'll have a hard time recruiting the VP of sales who will build and manage that team for success.  The good ones are ultracompetitive.  You didn't make top producer for the quarter?  Well I'm still excited at the number that person made because it shows how great our company is, but fuck, I'm gonna blow that shit out of the water next quarter.<p>I've been to the sales meeting junkets as CEO.  They love to hear from the CEO...briefly.  Rev them up and get them excited that <i>this</i> company is going somewhere <i>BIG</i>.  Then get off the stage, give it back to the VP of sales, and leave.  The VP is their boss, their protector, and makes sure the comp and commissions are paid.  The CEO has to balance all sorts of things.  The VP has to...bring in the revenue!<p>Obviously people like that would hate to work in engineering, and you wouldn't want to work with someone like that on your engineering team.  Different worlds.<p>It's very common in tech companies for engineering to shit on sales (why won't they just go sell what we've got?) and marketing (our product is so great, what do this assholes do anyway?) sales to shit on engineering (those shits just say no all the time and never work on what the customer really wants).  The effective companies are where they respect each other and realize that their cultures are different but that they need each other.  I'm surprised how infrequently I see that.