5 ms·

I would never tell a salesperson he/she can't code just because he/she is a salesperson. That would be a foolish over-generalization.

tptacek 17y ago
I think she's right. But she's not saying anything 100 other posts haven't tried to pound into our heads.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- CapitalistCartr 17y ago
  So many marketers keep writing this article because so many techies keep trying to do marketing, as if it weren't a real skill.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It's also the case that if we'd just check our egos at the gate for a little while, we have more to learn from the salesy/marketey people than from yet another web framework developer; after all, most of the devs I know are proud of figuring the dev stuff out for themselves.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  She's not "right", She's just coasting on a generalization. If I say "physicists can't surf", I can probably find twenty examples to prove it but it will still be a ridiculous generalization.
  - michellegreer1 17y ago
    The best physicists probably can't surf. I'd be shocked if a professional surfer could tell me much about physics. Just because you can, it doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'm a lot more effective as a marketer when I am selling someone else's code versus something I could scrap together.
    - nir 17y ago
      Garrett Lisi is a pretty good surfer/physicist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi
      - christofd 17y ago
        nice find! amazing guy.
        diN0bot 17y ago
        this is exactly why stereotypes and generalizations are a disservice to everyone. there are times when statistics are applicable, eg making business decisions based on market research. maybe it is even relevant when deciding what to write about. however, it is complete baloney when it comes to making a judgment about individuals. For that matter, it makes for a stupid, black-and-white, controversial blog post title...which i suppose is the point.
        ror 17y ago
        good
    - rjurney 17y ago
      I think most surfers have a more intuitive sense of physics than normal people. We are after all the only ones that actually ride waves - and waves, be they sound or light, are pretty important in physics :) This doesn't excuse programmers from ignoring your advice. We're a stubborn lot, and we make a living diving into situations where we have no idea what the hell we're doing, figuring it out, and carrying the day that way. We try to apply that to marketing, which is why most of our companies fail - it doesn't work that way in other fields. The ability to learn on the fly is usually more costly than it is with building software.
    - InclinedPlane 17y ago
      Being a physicist and being a surfer are not particularly correlated. As it turns out, being a physicist is rare, as is being a surfer, so finding a physicist surfer is unlikely, but that alone doesn't speak to the correlation of those skills. Having a debilitating disease such as ALS is almost certainly much more strongly negatively correlated with being a physicist than is surfing, yet nobody would be silly enough (given the notable counter example) to say "people with ALS can't be physicists" as a blanket statement.
  - xtho 17y ago
    No it wouldn't if it were true for, let's say, 9 physicists out of 10. But then such a statement would probably be true for all of mankind. Human beings can't surf.
    - amackera 17y ago
      I think you just exemplified how ridiculous that generalisation was.
atkuebler 17y ago
I would agree, I am a sales person learning to code, but my coding skills will never be great because that is not my focus. My focus is sales and marketing. In the same way a developer can learn a little bit of sales and do an OK job at it, but will never be great, because that is not their focus. Now if a developer were to stop most of his coding and immersing himself in sales, he could pick it up with time, in the same way I could pick up coding. But that would be a waste of time for the both of us because we have already invested in the skills we have. Not that we shouldn't learn a little bit of the other side, that is very important. But focus on what your good at.
michellegreer1 17y ago
I can't code. Well, I know a little HTML, but I'm a salesperson/marketer. I'd take no offense to this statement. I also know very few good salespeople who can code. This post was written because I had clients who had built software, sold it off, and then were all big in their britches and thought they were marketing gods. The ads they wrote were totally awful and they blamed everyone but themselves for their high bounce rates. Maybe there are coders who are marketing gods. Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps. Jes' sayin'.
- patio11 17y ago
  Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true. There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers. Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around. P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing. And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Yes, but now you have to go re-learn radix tries. Stupid brain cache! You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth. Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.
Confusion 17y ago
But you would tell a salesperson he probably can't code and you when you're upset with your sales team thinking they can code, you might write an article entitled "Salespeople can't code. Sorry". We all make generalizations when we are trying to make a point, because it is the best way to state a point clearly. A title like "Many webdevelopers seem to have a less-than-average capacity to sell" states something so mind numbingly obvious that you'd ignore the article. When someone says "webdevelopers can't sell", you should interpret that as "if you are a webdeveloper, you may be interested in this article, because you may be overlooking some important things that help you sell your app". Interestingly, your type of response illustrates the article: you criticize details, while ignoring the big picture. That's the same as mentioning your features, but not the problem you solve.
diN0bot 17y ago
amen. plus, these kinds of statements, and stereotypes in general, tend to be self-fulfilling: if you think all X's can't do Y, then anyone who can do Y doesn't look like an X to you.
randomtask 17y ago
I think you're getting too hung up on the title. The point of the article is not that all web developers can't code, but rather that often they cannot and do not value the skills of people who can. If anything the title does a pretty good job of getting people to read it. Even if it does that by annoying a significant part of its target audience ;)

tptacek 17y ago

I think she's right. But she's not saying anything 100 other posts haven't tried to pound into our heads.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
CapitalistCartr 17y ago
So many marketers keep writing this article because so many techies keep trying to do marketing, as if it weren't a real skill.
- tptacek 17y ago
  It's also the case that if we'd just check our egos at the gate for a little while, we have more to learn from the salesy/marketey people than from yet another web framework developer; after all, most of the devs I know are proud of figuring the dev stuff out for themselves.
joe_the_user 17y ago
She's not "right", She's just coasting on a generalization. If I say "physicists can't surf", I can probably find twenty examples to prove it but it will still be a ridiculous generalization.
- michellegreer1 17y ago
  The best physicists probably can't surf. I'd be shocked if a professional surfer could tell me much about physics. Just because you can, it doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'm a lot more effective as a marketer when I am selling someone else's code versus something I could scrap together.
  - nir 17y ago
    Garrett Lisi is a pretty good surfer/physicist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi
    - christofd 17y ago
      nice find! amazing guy.
      - diN0bot 17y ago
        this is exactly why stereotypes and generalizations are a disservice to everyone. there are times when statistics are applicable, eg making business decisions based on market research. maybe it is even relevant when deciding what to write about. however, it is complete baloney when it comes to making a judgment about individuals. For that matter, it makes for a stupid, black-and-white, controversial blog post title...which i suppose is the point.
      - ror 17y ago
        good
  - rjurney 17y ago
    I think most surfers have a more intuitive sense of physics than normal people. We are after all the only ones that actually ride waves - and waves, be they sound or light, are pretty important in physics :) This doesn't excuse programmers from ignoring your advice. We're a stubborn lot, and we make a living diving into situations where we have no idea what the hell we're doing, figuring it out, and carrying the day that way. We try to apply that to marketing, which is why most of our companies fail - it doesn't work that way in other fields. The ability to learn on the fly is usually more costly than it is with building software.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    Being a physicist and being a surfer are not particularly correlated. As it turns out, being a physicist is rare, as is being a surfer, so finding a physicist surfer is unlikely, but that alone doesn't speak to the correlation of those skills. Having a debilitating disease such as ALS is almost certainly much more strongly negatively correlated with being a physicist than is surfing, yet nobody would be silly enough (given the notable counter example) to say "people with ALS can't be physicists" as a blanket statement.
- xtho 17y ago
  No it wouldn't if it were true for, let's say, 9 physicists out of 10. But then such a statement would probably be true for all of mankind. Human beings can't surf.
  - amackera 17y ago
    I think you just exemplified how ridiculous that generalisation was.

atkuebler 17y ago

I would agree, I am a sales person learning to code, but my coding skills will never be great because that is not my focus. My focus is sales and marketing. In the same way a developer can learn a little bit of sales and do an OK job at it, but will never be great, because that is not their focus. Now if a developer were to stop most of his coding and immersing himself in sales, he could pick it up with time, in the same way I could pick up coding. But that would be a waste of time for the both of us because we have already invested in the skills we have. Not that we shouldn't learn a little bit of the other side, that is very important. But focus on what your good at.

michellegreer1 17y ago

I can't code. Well, I know a little HTML, but I'm a salesperson/marketer. I'd take no offense to this statement. I also know very few good salespeople who can code. This post was written because I had clients who had built software, sold it off, and then were all big in their britches and thought they were marketing gods. The ads they wrote were totally awful and they blamed everyone but themselves for their high bounce rates. Maybe there are coders who are marketing gods. Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps. Jes' sayin'.

patio11 17y ago
Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true. There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers. Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around. P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing. And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Yes, but now you have to go re-learn radix tries. Stupid brain cache! You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth. Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.

Confusion 17y ago

But you would tell a salesperson he probably can't code and you when you're upset with your sales team thinking they can code, you might write an article entitled "Salespeople can't code. Sorry". We all make generalizations when we are trying to make a point, because it is the best way to state a point clearly. A title like "Many webdevelopers seem to have a less-than-average capacity to sell" states something so mind numbingly obvious that you'd ignore the article. When someone says "webdevelopers can't sell", you should interpret that as "if you are a webdeveloper, you may be interested in this article, because you may be overlooking some important things that help you sell your app". Interestingly, your type of response illustrates the article: you criticize details, while ignoring the big picture. That's the same as mentioning your features, but not the problem you solve.

diN0bot 17y ago

amen. plus, these kinds of statements, and stereotypes in general, tend to be self-fulfilling: if you think all X's can't do Y, then anyone who can do Y doesn't look like an X to you.

randomtask 17y ago

I think you're getting too hung up on the title. The point of the article is not that all web developers can't code, but rather that often they cannot and do not value the skills of people who can. If anything the title does a pretty good job of getting people to read it. Even if it does that by annoying a significant part of its target audience ;)