One possible explanation: business owners have more skin in the game and care the most, so they are the most demanding and can’t tolerate waste. So they are the hardest to satisfy.

Additionally, they are not used to mincing their words because they don’t have bosses and are the most direct (and also egoistic).

I’ve owned some trivially small businesses, and something I think is missing in the discussion is how quickly people’s presumptuous bullshit has me on the phone burning time-money. They think I’m rude, it’s them though, and their sloppy sales ‘lies’.

In those roles it’s not that I’m king whatever of wherever, but I know intimately how much my hours capitalize for, and given that lots of sales/customer communication is happening on the phone, you get a big impedance. Smug low tier sellers trying to talk past me, and flatly disrespecting me when trying to rationalize their pre-packaged pitch.

Architecture is customer facing. I am nice, and soft spoken the first time. But when kindness is misunderstood as ineptitude and people start talking to me like I’m a girl who could just never, like, understand a transmission…? My only regrets are not hanging up hard enough and refraining from swearing at them in the early years.

Other people’s C-tier employees and D-tier operations are not my problem unless and until they pay me.