John Mulaney gets paid by prompt fondlers to tell jokes at a party. He spends 45 minutes telling them that they are idiots, which is nice.

49 points

If you didn’t read the article, go read it, that shit is fucking hilarious

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19 points

Seconding that, holy shit I like him even more now.

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15 points

Look folks, i took the advice of the above posters, and I have to say, it’s pretty solid. 5 minutes well spent

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45 points

This is great.

What I’ve heard from my endless hours of comedy podcasts is that at corporate gigs like this, sometimes some execs start getting the idea that, because comedy is being performed, that they get to make some jokes too. Once they get up on stage, the worst possible mask off shit just pours forth. I kind of want to know if that happened.

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33 points

“You’re a VP of customer success?” he asked another attendee. “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”

Okay what the fuck is a “VP of customer success” though, that’s a title so made up money laundering has to be involved, no?

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21 points

“Customer success” has been creeping into biztalk lately. According to Ed Zitron it refers to that subspecies of salescritter that works with SaaS victimscustomers to ensure they keep expanding their buying.

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10 points

Basically, yeah. At my last job working in vendor support the “customer success” team was entirely sales-focused. Support (as in “my product isn’t working as expected please help”) was under a different department that would sometimes get badgered by the customer success guys if it seemed like a case was making it harder to upsell, or if the customer’s problem was that they wanted to do something their current purchase didn’t cover.

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18 points

The industry called it “field engineering” previously, and “customer support” prior to that; renames happened every time the execs heard how this portion of their business is only a cost center and can easily be done by chat bots (to which the customer success people would say, good luck with that).

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10 points
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It’s like how “marketing” became “UX research/design”

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3 points

Marketing has not become UX research/design, you can’t possibly know what UX design is and say that.

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5 points

Ok, you’ve convinced me

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3 points

Usually it’s the part of the org that is directly interacting with big, corporate customers. Those customers can and often do directly shape how a product works. It’s like a sales team, but focused on existing customers with big contracts (that might be expanded), rather than acquiring new customers.

But admittedly, this has just been my experience. I’m sure it’s probably not universally true.

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2 points

in a startup model where product directly implements function requests from clients, it’d be the head of deciding which functions, sprints, priorities etc.

And/or ensuring that clients are handled well enough so they’re not at risk of churn at the q3/q4 turnaround.

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33 points

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24 points

I wish I could see that set and the audience reactions.

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29 points
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I’m afraid for that, as I fear you would see a lot of laughing people. The emperor knows he is naked, but he still is emperor and he sees the people pretend he has clothes. The people of the court also know the emperor is naked, but he is the emperor and they will go along with his wishes. What are they going to do? Quit?

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