Don’t just hire IT guys. A mechanic might be better at helping customers succeed with your software than a software engineer.

Diversity is key to any team. But when we think of diversity, we think of a great mix of genders, nationalities, and age groups. At Yonder, we’re certainly living this to the fullest — we are global but Swiss. Our employees are based in Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Brazil, the United States, Singapore, and the Philippines. Nationalities include Switzerland, Germany, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and the Philippines.

So far so good. But have you ever thought about diversity in professions? Common wisdom says you should hire mechanics to fix cars, and programmers to build software.

Whilst I certainly agree with hiring people with deep professional expertise, there are a few exceptions I strongly believe in for IT companies.

1. The Sales Team Should Be Non-Technical

Even if you’re selling a technical product such as our B2B SaaS product, your sales team should be non-technical, non-IT people. Our sales team consists of people who can fly an aircraft, have worked for airports, and have worked in aircraft maintenance. By not being IT guys but as close as possible to our potential buyers, they can present a technical product in a non-technical way, making it more compelling to end users.

2. The Customer Team Should Be Non-Technical

Once the deal is closed, our customer team takes over from the sales team and helps the customer get onboarded with our product. And just as in sales, the customers we work with are typically non-technical, non-IT people. Our customer team consists of people who have set up global service centers, ran a subsidiary of a Swiss company in Malaysia, worked on the construction site of the longest tunnel on the planet, and flew on fast Air Force jets as navigators.

In comparison to our sales team, our customer team needs a little more IT knowledge. They need to help our customers configure complex workflows, set up import and export profiles for complex XML documents, and map customer’s single-sign-on systems to our product. Whilst such tasks would normally be attributed to IT guys, we trained our customer team to perform those tasks largely without help from our IT team. This eliminates misunderstandings between the customer, our customer team, and our IT team, yielding better solutions faster.

Why is this possible? First of all, because we are a bunch of hands-on people. We are used to training our colleagues and getting trained by our colleagues. Second, we have a culture that allows us to ask any question to anybody on the team. Third, Switzerland has a dual education system, bringing out an unbeatable mix of academics and hands-on professionals.

Conclusion: An Ode to Engineers

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a software engineer, and we employ plenty of capable software engineers in our company. I am an engineer myself, and I still enjoy technical work.

But let’s never forget that the majority of the population aren’t engineers and that engineers need to build products not for themselves, but for non-technical end users.