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I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and not seeing that marketing isn't only spam, lies and shit. I think most engineers as

I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and not seeing that marketing isn't only spam, lies and shit. I think most engineers associate marketing with sleazy SEO/affiliate/self-promotion people who offer little to no added value to the web, society or humanity, who will lie, cheat and steal to make a buck. Most engineers don't want to be like those people in any way, and that's a good thing, because we'd all be better off if those people were gone. But not all of marketing is "I have a shitty product, it has no encryption, but I will just say that it has super mega NSA encryption because stupid consumers will not know the difference". A lot of marketing is just getting the information out there. I think it's similar to SEO in that sense. There's the shit that's manipulating Google (and Google is willfully playing along) by just spinning the same text thousands of times and stuffing keywords into it. Everybody would be better off if that disappeared. But there's also the basic common sense SEO. Make sure your HTML works, well, make sure you have your headlines in <h1>, <h2> etc, make sure the important pages you want found can actually be reached with links on your site, make sure your site loads fast etc.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think your view on this will depend on what do you believe the distribution of good vs. evil in marketing looks like. Is it like this? ^ DECENCY PROFIT | ---> <--- | ---> /---- <--- | /--- \---- | /---- \---- | /--- \---- | /--- \-- +------------------------------------------------> EVIL GOOD Or like this? ^ DECENCY PROFIT | -> |\ <---------- | -> | \ <---------- | | \- | / \-- | / \----------- | /- \------------------ +------------------------------------------------> EVIL GOOD I personally believe it's the latter. I added arrows indicating opposing incentives at personal level, and I believe the profit motive is much stronger than personal morals, for two main reasons. One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted. Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do that".
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  > One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted. I have recently learned here on HN, that this is called a Red Queen's race. Since like me everyone on HN loves expressive language I am spreading the word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    If you haven't seen this, you'll be in for a treat: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It's a very thorough discussion of the topic. A rather long read, but absolutely worth it.
    - amelius 6y ago
      Interesting read. What I don't get is that they compare Moloch (total competition) to Nature. > (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative) But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc. Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        Organizations into cells, organs, systems, is basically describing mergers and acquisitions, and also that companies have different roles inside them, each doing various tasks: marketing, sales, engineering, management, etc.
hnick 6y ago
I think it's less narrow mindedness and more of the engineering mindset that deals with the tangible, the literal, the quantifiable, and the possible. From that perspective, if you are not lying in your marketing, then you must just be telling truths about your product. So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words? Obviously this doesn't work for most people. Long feature lists can even be a turn off. But I think software people often see products through the lens of what it can do instead of how it makes them feel. That is the hurdle I think a lot of us have to get over because we are so used to writing code to make programs do things and not to make people feel things (I can't imagine how that unit test looks).
- walrus01 6y ago
  > So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words? From the perspective of an engineer this works really well if your target market is also engineers, in a very clearly defined vertical market for a highly technical product. Such as components for UAVs or DWDM transport systems. Some engineers choose specifically to work for companies in a niche field because they find it easier and less stressful to also deal with customers who are their respective companies' subject matter experts on the subsystem.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Yes, definitely. Know your audience etc. When I'm looking at SaaS software and it's missing key info, features, and has the old "ask for a quote" it's code for "go get your manager, kid". As a side note, this is why landing pages exist. Another marketing gimmick of course, but having separate pages that people won't reach by mistake lets the message suit the audience. I struggled with that concept for a long time. Shouldn't every page on our site be nicely accessible from a menu just like the contents page of a book? Not always. Give the wrong first impression and you might not get another.
rottcodd 6y ago
People prefer dealing with machinery to dealing with bureaucracies. - jmc

TeMPOraL 6y ago

I think your view on this will depend on what do you believe the distribution of good vs. evil in marketing looks like. Is it like this? ^ DECENCY PROFIT | ---> <--- | ---> /---- <--- | /--- \---- | /---- \---- | /--- \---- | /--- \-- +------------------------------------------------> EVIL GOOD Or like this? ^ DECENCY PROFIT | -> |\ <---------- | -> | \ <---------- | | \- | / \-- | / \----------- | /- \------------------ +------------------------------------------------> EVIL GOOD I personally believe it's the latter. I added arrows indicating opposing incentives at personal level, and I believe the profit motive is much stronger than personal morals, for two main reasons. One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted. Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do that".

allendoerfer 6y ago
> One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted. I have recently learned here on HN, that this is called a Red Queen's race. Since like me everyone on HN loves expressive language I am spreading the word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  If you haven't seen this, you'll be in for a treat: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It's a very thorough discussion of the topic. A rather long read, but absolutely worth it.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Interesting read. What I don't get is that they compare Moloch (total competition) to Nature. > (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative) But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc. Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Organizations into cells, organs, systems, is basically describing mergers and acquisitions, and also that companies have different roles inside them, each doing various tasks: marketing, sales, engineering, management, etc.

hnick 6y ago

I think it's less narrow mindedness and more of the engineering mindset that deals with the tangible, the literal, the quantifiable, and the possible. From that perspective, if you are not lying in your marketing, then you must just be telling truths about your product. So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words? Obviously this doesn't work for most people. Long feature lists can even be a turn off. But I think software people often see products through the lens of what it can do instead of how it makes them feel. That is the hurdle I think a lot of us have to get over because we are so used to writing code to make programs do things and not to make people feel things (I can't imagine how that unit test looks).

walrus01 6y ago
> So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words? From the perspective of an engineer this works really well if your target market is also engineers, in a very clearly defined vertical market for a highly technical product. Such as components for UAVs or DWDM transport systems. Some engineers choose specifically to work for companies in a niche field because they find it easier and less stressful to also deal with customers who are their respective companies' subject matter experts on the subsystem.
- hnick 6y ago
  Yes, definitely. Know your audience etc. When I'm looking at SaaS software and it's missing key info, features, and has the old "ask for a quote" it's code for "go get your manager, kid". As a side note, this is why landing pages exist. Another marketing gimmick of course, but having separate pages that people won't reach by mistake lets the message suit the audience. I struggled with that concept for a long time. Shouldn't every page on our site be nicely accessible from a menu just like the contents page of a book? Not always. Give the wrong first impression and you might not get another.

rottcodd 6y ago

People prefer dealing with machinery to dealing with bureaucracies. - jmc