Sales comes out of who you genuinely are

Let's flip it around: to give out good advice, you need offer it based on actual experience and not just suppositions. (not necessarily true either, but it sure seems like it would strengthen your argument)

In reality, by being who you genuinely are you can earn living, if you're lucky, but to earn wealth you need to press and push and cheat.

Look, at the differences between CL and Java, Redis and MongoDB, Postgres and MySQL to name the few very popular examples. "Commercially successful" products invest heavily in creating, creating a misleading hype and other manipulations.

Being who you means to become a marginal, a hobbyist, with, perhaps, much above average abilities, in the best case.

But to make money you must pressure and bullshit people, because it is only by cheating you could get above-average returns. It is much easier and cheaper than to make something which is above average.

Look at that Java, ERP, or artificially inflated open source crap? This is how to sell. SAP has the best sales people it could hire. But once you're convinced to buy - you are locked for life.

It is all about tricks like SEO or MVPs, faked reviews or whatever, when you put words and hype ahead of the real things. And, of course, there are people, who are ready to do tricks instead of doing real things.

I'm not trying to say that it is illegal - trying to exploit fools is a legal practice, the problem is that it become a dominant one.

Writing a pleasant stories for fools instead of real product specifications and reference documentation is so common, that nobody even reads it anymore.)

Wow. Someone's projecting, it sounds like.

+1 for giving sales people some overdue respect. I too feel that there are few that just ruin the bunch, much like HR.

Yes, to build wealth you need to press and push--no one is going to give you anything for free and pre-buyers remorse can be a bitch. But cheat? I don't know about that--it depends on your definition.

If cheating is maintaining borderline outrageous profit margins, then yes, it helps to do that. But if cheating is something more along the lines of getting 50% up front for a project you underbid, then holding that money hostage while you proceed to milk the project with change orders every step of the way--then yes, that's cheating (and probably illegal-ish). Plenty of people operate this way but I think it's a pretty bad way to do business--both from an economic standpoint and a how-did-you-get-to-be-such-a-terrible-person? standpoint. And then of course there's the run-of-the-mill cheating that is enterprise software marketing departments, but if that's your worst sin in life, I think you're probably doing ok.

And while there are plenty of cases of crooks making out like bandits, there are just as many about pretty honest people making out like bandits as well. Compare Mike Milken and Warren Buffet for example. Or from tech, the guy that started color vs pg. As far as what I've read about both of them, they seem like rather different personality types, but both of them seem to be doing ok financially.

So yes, nothing is cut and dry, and anyone that says you can't make a lot of money via semi-legal stealing is dead wrong, but I really don't think this is the only--or even the most expedient--way to get rich. Speaking personally, I prefer sitting around coming up with ways to build value for customers instead of coming up with more clever ways of fucking them.