bballant

The Marketing Team

As a few cats from my company head to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, I’m reminded of the inherent conflict between the Marketing type and the Engineering type.  This conflict is typically manifested in a bunch of frenetic last-minute marketing requests around the promotion of projects engineers have spent months on.  My reaction is usually the same.  “We have been thinking about this project for a long long time, why are you just now deciding you desperately NEED thing X?”  I genuinely feel that the average digital-age marketer does jack most of the time and thinks only in small, shallow bursts.

The marketing team is on shaky ground to start when dealing with engineers.  Engineers often feel they do the hard work—the anti-social mind-crushing problem solving followed by heavy duty sustained shoveling—only to see the marketer give it an annoying catchy name, put on a smile, get free drinks and pats on the ass, and act like (S)HE has all the answers.  Then come the interruptions and last-minute requests. Paul Graham (who himself is essentially an engineer turned marketer) writes about the maker’s schedule vs. the manager’s schedule.  This is a great essay for illustrating my point or sharing with a boss… and I’ll leave this little rant here.

I’m confident the work my engineering colleagues have put together for MWC will stand on it’s own.  It’s annoying we need to hire a marketing team to go to the free drinks events and use the latest lingo to describe what we make.  But I understand that this is how it works.  In the end the investment in marketing provides returns that help provide my paycheck, and I certainly appreciate getting paid.

Finally, I enjoy coding as much as I enjoy getting paid, which is why my personal projects tend to be weird and have no commercial (or really any type of) relevance.  But if I’m not getting paid, then it’s my time.  To quote Mikey from Goonies “…But right now, they got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here.”