During these past months working my way through the spanish business landscape, I have come to learn a lot about business, negotiation, marketing, fiscal policy and economic activity in general.

One of such lessons is that every single agent in a negotiation falls in two categories, either you are an indispensable middle man that cannot be cutted off the deal, or you are a provider for some good or service.

There is nothing else, this is how value is transmitted from one place to another in the economy.

The value of a middle man is access to an opportunity or market, while the value of the provider is what it can deliver. It is a channel or a gateway to the opportunity and usually benefits from a toll or a one-time payment for information.

Job boards, HR consulting companies, someone who knows someone or something are all examples of middle men.

The value of a provider depends on the degree at which it can provide what any other agent involved in the negotiation wants.

If you are a soap provider, it will be the quality of your soap in relation to its purpose, either it cleans clothes well or safely cleans skin.

If you are a software developer, it will be the processes that your software will impact through their automation, which we compute by a concrete set of metrics that should imply increased efficiency.

The value of software is automation of other value-producing business processes through processing, transformation and succesfull communication of data. That is pretty much it.

As a software developer, systems administrator, cloud or devops engineer, your value is how good of an interface or translator to a collection of esoteric technologies you are.

You are a human living compiler or magician in the eyes of management and human resource personel. That’s it.

Under capitalism if something significatly better comes along, such as what Delvin was implied to be or a better future iteration it, then you better get good at controlling it and becoming the middle man between the technology and the business people, or you will get discarded into irrelevancy.

You could argue that your consciousness is already a middle man between technical knowledge and business people, but for the sake of argument, let’s not get too metaphysical on this article.

Now that we have stated some cold-hearted truths, let’s follow up with an example of a somewhat immoral negotiation and its implications I have been thinking about.

Let’s say we have developer P who has an interview with a client that we will call E and another consultant that we will call R.

E was looking for a professional with experience doing integrations with the Teams API.

On this interaction, both E and R where middlemen for the interaction and P is to be the provider of such expertise.

P has studied the Teams API beforehand but has never done an integration of this kind.

What should P do in this case?

Option A

• Communicate his lack of experience to E and R
• P would not be the right kind of service provider for this client, and so the call ends, almost abruptly.
• P does not get paid and losses his opportunity to gain experience.

Option B

• Lie to E and R and make up a story.
• E and R may buy it or not, but if they do this project is delegated to P.
• This project can have two possible outcomes:
  • P works his ass off to become the right provider and delivers successfully, he gets paid.
  • P finds out that he cannot do it and communicates to the client the situation, he does not get paid.

Is option B cheating?

In option A the outcome will always be the same, which is that no business transaction is made.

Option B could be considered dishonest and has some risk involved, but one could argue that it makes more sense from a business perspective and probably a moral one, given that there is at least a chance that the client gets what he or she asks for.

Understanding this logic makes immediately apparent why business people can feel so scummy, sometimes they need to embellish the truth or put lipstick to the pig in order to make the sale, even if later they take ownership on the risk involved and are able to deliver.

In other words, most of the time you do not go to war with the army you want but the one you have, and markets are the modern day battlefields in the times of peace, so you go to market with the leads you get not the ones you want.

I personally hate this situation and would consider that this is a case of bad demand to offer match which requires a very serious observation of the provider’s marketing strategy, which over the long run would improve the quality of your leads.

I am an engineer by training and value truth and transparency above all else, which I am discovering to be generally bad for business.

One could argue that this judgement should always depend on the client itself, letting E make a decision based on truthful and transparent information.

But in a ruthless and highly competitive business environment, this is not an incentive neither to providers nor middle men.

On the other hand, the best opportunities will always lie on the side of risk, that is why you always need to strive to keep doing whatever you do increasingly better and be able to precisely measure this risk in order to take advantage of such opportunities.

Another thing we could derive from these points, assuming they are facts, is that most mediocre middle men and providers will always talk themselves into making the deal or sale, meaning that as a client you need to protect yourself.

One way is asking for proof of execution as a list of previous clients or references that have previously dealt with this provider, which can be messy and difficult, and can leave out good candidates that are perfectly good for the activity or task you need to have executed.

Another way is to only pay for completed work, but most providers will not start it without an initial fee that shows availability of funds, this is probably a good middle path.

Finally, at least from what I can think of, a good heuristic a client may use is brand as reference of value or what in other places we would call reputation for quality.

So if you are a provider, the best possible investment you can make for improving the success rate of your sales process is to have a brand that shows quality of execution for whatever you are supposed to provide, and have happy customers that can do the marketing for you.

This is why one common advice in business is to niche into a market or service, so that you can reliably execute it and build a brand upon it.

These are just some thoughts, some people might ask themselves why I am pondering if my trade is software development and engineering.

The ugly truth is that in the business of life, we are all salesmen selling ourselves on all aspects, even as employees.

Thinking otherwise is a luxury that we as an industry have enjoyed from a long time, but which eventually will allow other people to take advantage of our own skills.

Either you learn to sell or you will get sold.

And even if you learn to sell yourself, you might be sold down the pipeline.

That is all for today’s article.