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In most companies I have worked on, marketing has had its own engineers. It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. In this world, tec

In most companies I have worked on, marketing has had its own engineers. It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. In this world, technical problems occur everywhere in a company. The question is whether those problems are best solved by centralizing all devs in a single org or distributing them where needed. In large companies, marketing is one of the largest spenders of technical / application budgets and resources. They need to run applications and experiments for usability, design and revenue generation. The problem appears to be conflict with "product" devs because of the common surface they must work on (the site, new feature testing, etc.) I think the main issue here, regardless of small startup vs large company, is what org is responsible for what. I see in the article some sentiment of "finger pointing" which indicates to me that people have not answer that question. Once that question is answered, it would seem to be the accountable people should be free to design the best way to get something done. There will always be conflicts (some junior devs or product managers launch a tiny irrelevant feature and want marketing to stop everything to "tell the world about it," or product marketing wants Dev to prioritize some features higher because of revenue, without necessarily realizing the implementation complexities). Fingerprinting is easy. Designing orgs and communication for tough problems is not easy.

apalmer 12y ago
I think this post is closest aligned to my understanding of the situation. Literally marketing needs a lot of technical work done, they have enough funding and influence that they can hire their own technical staff instead of 'queuing' up work requests from the centralized technical staff. Depending on your frame of reference this is either a management failure, or a nimble 'multitasking' management structure. I would probably come down on 'management failure' but thats very subjective.
korzun 12y ago
> It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. I hope your next medical procedure is done by a surgeon hired by the hospitals marketing team. Good luck.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Yours was a knee-jerk reaction. You did not really read my comment. It is not the responsibility of the hospital marketing team to perform a medical procedure. They do hire surgeons and medical experts to make sure the hospital capabilities are differentiated from other hospitals. It is their job to compete with other hospitals as patients make their selection process for where to go. Going back to out real industry, many orgs in a company can hire, and do hire, technical talent. And this technical talent perform their technical function for the org that hired them.
  - korzun 12y ago
    You can't hire a surgeon if you don't know anything about surgery. In hospitals, marketing teams are mostly outsourced and have no interaction with surgeons. Your idea of them hiring surgeons to audit staff is ridiculous. Laughable even. It's very easy to see the impact of horrible hires in that sector. People die. Technology sector? Not so much. Have fun selling your 'technology' company that has dozen of engineers hired by marketing that lack any sort of leadership or accountability. We are not talking about hiring an office manager or customer service representative. Using your strategy, things will 'work' for a bit but you will pay for it in the long run. Well, not you. The investors and founders will.
    - hyperliner 12y ago
      But what does this have to do with the fact that marketing departments can hire engineering talent to work on marketing functions? (Which is the focus of the article)
      - korzun 12y ago
        Marketing work will often overlap with general engineering work. Landing pages for example require integration with existing software or it's own eco-system. Former is a headache because you will have random engineers getting into your repository and deployment process. Most of the time it will be done at the last second and I can guarantee you will be forced to by pass 'standards' and push out whatever crazy shit they want to launch. Latter will mean you will be wasting time/$ on doing the same thing twice (unless you want to use existing devops to cut a chunk of infrastructure for them, does marketing needs their own devops too? what is the cut off here?).

apalmer 12y ago

I think this post is closest aligned to my understanding of the situation. Literally marketing needs a lot of technical work done, they have enough funding and influence that they can hire their own technical staff instead of 'queuing' up work requests from the centralized technical staff. Depending on your frame of reference this is either a management failure, or a nimble 'multitasking' management structure. I would probably come down on 'management failure' but thats very subjective.

korzun 12y ago

> It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. I hope your next medical procedure is done by a surgeon hired by the hospitals marketing team. Good luck.

hyperliner 12y ago
Yours was a knee-jerk reaction. You did not really read my comment. It is not the responsibility of the hospital marketing team to perform a medical procedure. They do hire surgeons and medical experts to make sure the hospital capabilities are differentiated from other hospitals. It is their job to compete with other hospitals as patients make their selection process for where to go. Going back to out real industry, many orgs in a company can hire, and do hire, technical talent. And this technical talent perform their technical function for the org that hired them.
- korzun 12y ago
  You can't hire a surgeon if you don't know anything about surgery. In hospitals, marketing teams are mostly outsourced and have no interaction with surgeons. Your idea of them hiring surgeons to audit staff is ridiculous. Laughable even. It's very easy to see the impact of horrible hires in that sector. People die. Technology sector? Not so much. Have fun selling your 'technology' company that has dozen of engineers hired by marketing that lack any sort of leadership or accountability. We are not talking about hiring an office manager or customer service representative. Using your strategy, things will 'work' for a bit but you will pay for it in the long run. Well, not you. The investors and founders will.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    But what does this have to do with the fact that marketing departments can hire engineering talent to work on marketing functions? (Which is the focus of the article)
    - korzun 12y ago
      Marketing work will often overlap with general engineering work. Landing pages for example require integration with existing software or it's own eco-system. Former is a headache because you will have random engineers getting into your repository and deployment process. Most of the time it will be done at the last second and I can guarantee you will be forced to by pass 'standards' and push out whatever crazy shit they want to launch. Latter will mean you will be wasting time/$ on doing the same thing twice (unless you want to use existing devops to cut a chunk of infrastructure for them, does marketing needs their own devops too? what is the cut off here?).