I missed the original HN discussion but did look up your blog and read the post. I see your frustration, but as someone who has been exploring the digital mark

I missed the original HN discussion but did look up your blog and read the post. I see your frustration, but as someone who has been exploring the digital marketing space (well outside of Silicon Valley in Cleveland, Ohio), I can say that your assumption that marketers "know" about things like A/B testing might be a bit presumptuous. I put "know" in quotes to differentiate between "knowing" as in having heard of it, and "knowing" as in fully understanding it. I recently had a an accomplished and successful traditional marketing person tell me that A/B tests on his website were off-limits, like they were toxic voodoo. I understood the basis of his fears ("we can't afford to lose customers because of an A/B test") but they were totally unreasonable. I've also seen a sort of clumsy bum-rush into the digital marketing career space. I think lots of people realize the shift to this pace and it's now attracting swarms of people who come from non-technical backgrounds. My personal beliefs (which may be selfish due to my background), is that the winners in this frenzy will be the "growth hackers", as in the people who understand both marketing and hacking. For this purpose, I think hacking means people who look at system and the furthest level back that they can, figure out how the internals of the system work, and then use that information to get what they want out of the system. You don't necessarily have to be able to program (you certainly have to be able to communicate what you want to a programmer though, as you can't do things at scale without some programming help), but programmers typically tend to have the mentality of making systems work in their advantage.