Ask Slashdot: How Best To Teach Programming To Salespeople?

First time accepted submitter greglaw writes "Our company makes development tools, meaning that all our customers are programmers. If you'll forgive the sweeping generalization, on the whole good programmers don't make good salespeople and vice versa. However, it's important that our salespeople understand at some level the customers' problems and how exactly we can help. The goal is not to turn the salespeople into engineers, but just to have them properly understand e.g. what the customer means when he uses the term 'function call.' Most of our customers use C/C++. Does anyone have any recommendations for how best to go about this? Online courses or text books that give an introduction to programming in C/C++ would be great, but also any more general advice on this would be much appreciated."

It's doomed.

[Anonymous Coward]

...objects can be thought of as wrapping their data within a set of functions designed to ensure that the data are used appropriately, and to assist in that use(1)...SQUIRREL!

Re:Sales Engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, it should look more like this:

"SELECT `hotness`,`bra_size`,`butt_measurement`,`age` from
`Employees` WHERE (`sex` = 'F') AND (`age` < 35) AND (`dog` = 'false') ORDER BY `age` ASC, `hotness` DESC, LIMIT 0,25"

You insensitive clod.

Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[TapeCutter]

"presales engineer" - I've done that job, the sales people won't tell you where they keep the cocaine and hookers.