Huh, the comment claiming that "Salespeople are people too" got deleted. I guess responses were along the same lines as what I was going to post. It would be a shame to waste that piece of writing, so I'll put it here (while noting that, /u/cobertos, this is not a direct reply to you, but rather to another comment which was mostly along the lines of "it is not morally abhorrent to sell things, it can be mutually-beneficial")
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TL;DR you're mostly right, but Salespeople are still a distasteful necessity rather than something to be celebrated (without undermining any of your other points that it is fine, good, and morally permissible for people to sell things they've made or are working on).
Lest you dismiss me out-of-hand as another engineer who doesn't "get it", who is too hung up on technological purity and doesn't recognize that businesses are in the business of business, that you need to sell something in order to start the flywheel that lets you sell more things to get more money to build more things - trust me, I _do_ get it. I know that selling the product of your labours is essential for a) survival and b) being able to carry out more labours (I wish it weren't, but I recognize that that's the situation that we live in).
But you set up a false equivalence by simultaneously saying:
* '"Salespeople" are just people'
* 'people can be an authentic community member even if they happen to have something to sell to the community[...]if you regularly comment, ...then occasional self-promotion is fine[...]People act like if someone could possibly make a dime off something, it’s somehow morally abhorrent and must be stopped at all cost[...]It’s ok to make stuff then sell it and still interact with other humans. Selling stuff does not mutate you into an alien who can no longer authentically connect with another human'
The difference is that the latter examples are all well-intentioned and mutually-beneficial - a pre-existing community member (or, a new community member who already has ideals that align with the community) offering something that they genuinely believe will be of value. A Salesperson is not this. A Salesperson's intention is to intrude, deceive, and exaggerate to extract as much profit from a community as they can. A Salesperson has no interest in the well-being or survival of the community beyond its continued ability to be a source of profit. If that were not the case, _they wouldn't be a Salesperson in the first place_ - they would be a community member who happens to have things to sell (or recommend) to their community. The very act of defining their role as "focused on selling" - rather than "fostering a community" - presupposes this. If your job description is "Salesperson", and you go to your boss and say that you took an action that did not (and will not ever) result in more sales, but resulted in the community being healthier or more positive, you will be taken to task rather than congratulated (please do not "well actually" with the fact that "a more-healthy community will result in more future sales" - that is covered under "and will not ever").
As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely. Someone who shares the values, ideals, and intentions of a community selling to them is mutually beneficial and a net-good. Someone entering a community with the _intention_ of selling to them - a Salesperson - is much less likely to be beneficial, and more likely to be an exploitative snake. Maybe a "Salesperson" might actually make a worthwhile recommendation in a related thread ("You can sell useful stuff people want and are happy you offered") - good! Great! But they could have done that without _being_ a "Salesperson". They are, in a sense, not fulfilling their role there - they are instead acting in their role as community member (we can contain multitudes). Even if they were not employed as a Salesperson - even if they were in any other role in their company - and happened to notice that selling-opportunity, they could have taken it. The behaviours that are unique to a Salesperson are the harmful and distasteful ones - over-promotion, advertizing, astro-turfing, deception, cold-calling, pressure, intrusion.
But I know - I _know_ - that Salespeople are necessary for the growth and success of a company. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work if your competitors are actively advertizing. Simply building the world's best FooWidget is insufficient if no-one knows how great it is. You _need_ to get the word out that your product is awesome and will solve problems and can be bought for the low low price of $X.99, otherwise you won't get any money and you won't be able to keep making FooWidgets. But just because Salespeople are necessary for a particular goal (which is, itself, only worthwhile because we have not yet achieved Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism) doesn't mean we should approve of them. My body needs to take a shit every day, but I'm not exactly delighted about that fact. They fulfill an unfortunately-necessary purpose, but they make everything worse (or, at least, not-better) by so-doing.
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> 99.99% of the time these same people will flock to high paying employers regardless of whether those employers follow these unwritten rules
This is not hypocrisy. Society is currently set up such that you need a certain degree of excess wealth to be able to give things away for free (see my pining above for FALGSC). Accumulation of (a little bit of) extra wealth to someone who's going to use that excess to build something of value, is more of a social good than that same extra wealth accruing to someone who's going to use it on a second Lambo.