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Our marketing department is literally making its revenue by adding hundreds of trackers and ads to our site, which goes counter to the goal of the actual busine

Our marketing department is literally making its revenue by adding hundreds of trackers and ads to our site, which goes counter to the goal of the actual business of selling our goods and services. I call that skimming. Marketing has taken ad networks and ad to sale attribution, and turned it into "we are going to sell all our customer's data and every click so marketing can claim revenue."

saycheese 10y ago
Giving a single example based on personal experience without context isn't strong argument or support for your claim. Beyond that, sounds like you're blaming sales & marketing for customers not being willing to pay for your code. Ever thought that just maybe the issue is your code?
anacleto 10y ago
That might be skimming. But this is exactly what the author highlighted in the article and Suster in his tweet. It's hard to find people who don't suck at it.
shostack 10y ago
Sounds like you should move to work at a company that is beholden to its paying customers. As a marketer at such a company, my job is twofold--to help people find our product (because they can be in market for what we offer but not know we exist), and get them the info they need to make their experience as positive as possible since there is a bit of a learning curve and our data shows that, shocker... people who know how to use our product are more likely to buy it and remain customers because they get more value out of it and unfortunately it isn't always easy to surface that info within the product. We don't sell or auction off our data because that would not be in the interest of our customers. Admittedly it can be confusing for sales reps from companies who want to put ads on our site when I explain why we wouldn't sell out our customers like that, so we are probably not the norm. As a marketer it is frustrating when things are done that harm the reputation of the profession just as i imagine many engineers hate bad actors who write malware or people who write basic CRUD apps, talk it up, and give the impression that software engineering is overly simple.

saycheese 10y ago

Giving a single example based on personal experience without context isn't strong argument or support for your claim. Beyond that, sounds like you're blaming sales & marketing for customers not being willing to pay for your code. Ever thought that just maybe the issue is your code?

anacleto 10y ago

That might be skimming. But this is exactly what the author highlighted in the article and Suster in his tweet. It's hard to find people who don't suck at it.

shostack 10y ago

Sounds like you should move to work at a company that is beholden to its paying customers. As a marketer at such a company, my job is twofold--to help people find our product (because they can be in market for what we offer but not know we exist), and get them the info they need to make their experience as positive as possible since there is a bit of a learning curve and our data shows that, shocker... people who know how to use our product are more likely to buy it and remain customers because they get more value out of it and unfortunately it isn't always easy to surface that info within the product. We don't sell or auction off our data because that would not be in the interest of our customers. Admittedly it can be confusing for sales reps from companies who want to put ads on our site when I explain why we wouldn't sell out our customers like that, so we are probably not the norm. As a marketer it is frustrating when things are done that harm the reputation of the profession just as i imagine many engineers hate bad actors who write malware or people who write basic CRUD apps, talk it up, and give the impression that software engineering is overly simple.