[tomc1985]

> What “marketing minds” are making decisions about service architecture? This seems like an imaginary issue.

It is hard to hold this comment in a generous light (per HN rules) when some of my most poignant experiences in dealing with tech vendor salespeople at conferences is (and I paraphrase), "well, it's working great for $MEGACORP, you do want to be like $MEGACORP dont you?"

One time I asked one of those salespeople point blank if that line actually works on people. Apparently it does. And those people for whom that line works with make big expensive tech decisions.

[dpark]

Did you become a marketing mind because they were pitching you?

I did not say that marketing isn’t making pitches. I said they aren’t making the decisions.

Any company allowing marketing to choose the technical platform for the engineers is going to be very short lived. This is not a real issue.

[mrbungie]

You're assuming engineers can't be victims of cargo cult, and we all know that's not globally true as it's been discussed multiple times on HN. Marketing teams know that as well, and they exploit that as much as they can.

[tomc1985]

> Marketing teams know that as well, and they exploit that as much as they can.

They exploit this mercilessly, just as hard as they exploit our curiosity and desire for novelty as engineers.

To the GP, your company's marketing/sales team may not drive internal technical decisions, but I can promise you that other companies' sales teams do. Why do you think they so persistently step on the heads up their first POC so they can be put in touch with C-levels or department heads?

Enterprise sales is a trip, dude

[dpark]

This is very “everyone else is such an idiot”. I feel like you’re a half step away from saying that engineers shouldn’t be allowed to learn about new tech because they’re too stupid to know when not to apply it.

If your team of engineers is incapable of determining good engineering trade-offs, and you have too little influence on the team to steer them back to a reasonable choice, it’s not really marketing’s fault.

You’re probably going to tell me again that I’m too dumb to understand that marketing impacts engineers, so let me be clear, I am well aware that marketing impacts engineers, just as it influences everyone else. But engineers are not helpless fools incapable of making decent technical decisions just because someone tried to sell them on whatever latest serverless tech.

[tomc1985]

Not at all. I am simply describing my experience with salescritters as a SWE. A good company gives Engineering a seat at the table but sometimes you have to deal with things imposed from higher up. This is especially true in a large company.

That said I think that we are a particularly gullible cohort with misplaced desire for novelty and shiny tech. We overrationalize in favor of these desires and have a hard time walking a mile in others' shoes. And companies know this and exploit this to constantly fill our heads with noise and bad ideas that happen to be profitable for them. This is one of my biggest beefs with "tech" in general, and why I am taking some time off from this trade.

[dpark]

> You're assuming engineers can't be victims of cargo cult

At no point did I say anything to that effect.

I’m saying that marketers are not making technical decisions. That’s all I’m saying.