What's one thing that's common between FAANG other than paying high salary - they all are Consumer companies (B2C). Other notable one includes Tesla, Adobe, Uber, Airbnb. What's one thing that's common between Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, SAP, Workday other than paying peanuts - they are primarily B2B companies (Enterprise companies). You will see clearly a cultural difference when working in a Consumer vs Enterprise Software companies. The Enterprise companies rely mainly on their strong Sales team and they can survive even with a mediocre tech Product. They know this and that's why they pay peanuts to engineer but lot more to Sales which makes them unattractive for Software Engineers. Consumer companies only moat is a strong tech Product that drives engagement, automation, comfort for Millions and Billions of Users. The sales tactics of making deals in Golf course won't work here and they need strong Tech and Product teams to actually have a killer Product.
Ever hear about plg? Plenty of b2b companies with strong tech and nonexistent sales
Partially true
Amazon’s B2B business (AWS) generates way more revenue than its B2C online retail business…
I was going to say that Amazon selling cloud computing to enterprises is the only thing keeping them profitable.
This is one of the dumbest takes I’ve seen here in a long time.
How did I forget to add you, you have a dumbest CEO from Sales / non-tech background
1. ServiceNow > Amazon as a place to work 2. Most FAANG makes a ton of money from B2B. I could argue that Amazon is more of a B2B company than B2C 3. Andy Jassy is also from a non-tech background (if you define tech as engineering) You sound even dumber now.
Ok, now find another commonality. What percentage of B2B and B2C companies is making actual profits and has been sustainable over a long run? Even in FAANG, is it B2B or B2C that is bringing in the money to sustain other projects?
Let’s remove Search from Google and Social media from Facebook, ads can make money by itself. The Product is still a consumer facing product and majority of engineers work there, not in the ads team
Your company’s survival depends on where the money comes from, Reddit. You are only able to do what you call exciting because some enterprises are willing to pay for it. I get the argument for ad revenues because it first onboarded users due to reliable tech and great user experience. That in turn incentivised its ad business from enterprises. But anything outside ads, most B2C are struggling. That includes Netflix, Amazon’s e-commerce, Alexa, Uber and even Facebook’s MAU is dropping. So sustainability is always a question. On the quality of work, I agree B2C can seem to be more interesting because you start seeing the outcomes pretty soon and the scale is pretty high. But large B2B enterprises are all serving millions of users too. Just the release process and adoption is slower because of the nature of business.
But Meta and Google monetize primarily in their offerings to businesses. Adobe has sizable B2B in addition to B2C. Amazon has huge B2B business in AWS. Microsoft has a lot of B2C.
Adobe is almost entirely B2B. As is any software company operating on a subscription model.... Google and Facebook's primary product (ads) is also B2B. Honestly Apple is probably the odd duck out in tech (if we exclude gaming), being a primarily consumer focused company....
Selling software to Professionals doesn’t make it an enterprise software.
When most of your customers are other corps, it does.... How many of Adobe's customers are end users? And how many are companies that install Adobe products on employee machines? I'd argue that any business software sold on a subscription model is almost always targeted at buy-it-for-use-at-work.... And yes this includes 365
You dislike B2B because sales runs the show? Why’s that a bad thing, not every product needs cutting edge innovation from eng and not everyone is an swe. But I do agree b2c is more exciting.
I worked in such companies. It feels very much like working for Michael Scott @ The office. All incentives are tied with increasing sales and squeezing money from customers. Engineering craft takes a backseat.
What are your thoughts on swe at b2c companies that just work on internal tooling? That’s pretty much as boring as being an eng at b2b right? And yeah license renewals are a big deal at b2b lol.
Agreed except atlassian 😀
Stripe, data bricks, snowflake
Stripe is trash anyways