Where to start
I worked in sales at a small computer software design company last year, which was really the pits. Everyone in the office was good fun, had a good time, got lots of work done... until the manager turned up.

He was only there before 9 and after 5 so he never saw what went on during the day.

Because he owned the company and had studied IT briefly back in the 1970s, he assumed he still knew more than the highly trained technical staff he hired, so whenever one of them had problem with the software, he would try and 'help'. This usually meant coming into the office with a 'solution' that made no sense and was usually for completely the wrong problem. But he would insist that the staff stop the work they were doing and try out his solution. Of course it didn't work, so he would say that they were incompetent.

Economics was certainly not his strong point. He genuinely believed that not putting prices on the company website was a good thing, even though all our competitors had their prices listed. He would happily charge considerably more than rivals for products that did a lot less - in one wonderful example, he decided that we should design our own GPS software for handheld PCs, but with only the functionality that you could see your location on a basic map, none of the actual routing etc. that people expect. He wanted to charge double the price that the other firms in the market were charging, saying that 'we would have to establish the product in the market first' before lowering the price to compete - I created a fully detailed sales report for this product that had a total annual sales figure of 0 based on talking to some potential customers - he sent it back with 500 scrawled on. Other times I sent him reports about software products and how improvements had to be made to keep up (many were five years old, with manuals making no reference to XP for example), they would be sent back with grammar and spelling corrected but obviously no notice taken. I think he thought I just wrote them to amuse myself...

He turned up one evening with a plan to create an incredibly elaborate piece of software for the vehicle routing industry - an enormous market, dominated by big firms with dozens of developers. We had two. Needless to say, after 6 months development, at the cost of all other projects, it was barely off the ground and was abandoned.

Advertising, the key to business development. Not here it seemed, a few poorly targeted googleads were the only things I was allowed to spend money on. Apparently their previous print adverts had not been profitable. I later found out that although the company was B2B, the adverts had been placed in a tiny readership academic journal (I think the boss knew the editor).

Ultimately sales figures were my downfall - he presented me with a number of annual sales targets for the various products, all of which were wildly more than any previous sales figures (seriously, I had to sell 500 copies of a piece of software that had sold 1 in the two years it had been on sale) - at the end of the year he said that the failure to reach these was completely due to my incompetence and fired me. Apparently I should have been cold calling companies from the phone book - I tried to explain that this was not only illegal but a complete waste of time because the software was so specialised that only one in a thousand firms would have any use for it (and when did you ever hear of people buying £10,000 bespoke computer software from cold callers?)

Phew, got that off my chest!
(R-T-C Got arbitrage profits?, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 14:21, 2 replies)

re: Cold calling
That's nothing. I worked in a place that occasionally cold-called for £30,000 property management packages.

Commiserations.
(broin, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 15:38, closed)

Click
Although I didn't like it. I'm glad I stayed on the hardware/systems side of the house and am not subject to unrealistic product deadlines.

:points and laughs ironically:
(blinkin the merrily misanthropic IT gremlin, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 23:00, closed)