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by FemmeAndroid 1030 days ago
I don’t know the specifics, but a company I worked at definitely decided to get ‘serious about ads’ by hiring a director of marketing and seemingly giving him an unchecked budget.

About 2 years later, he left the company. Very few - if any - customers were generated, but there was a sizable Google Ads spend.

I think the business owners had quite good luck with hiring talented people and letting them get to work, fairly hands-off. The guy spoke well and could quote many marketing gurus. I never found what he said to be particularly useful for the company, but I assumed he was getting results since someone was keeping him around.

I believe many owners of successful businesses have blind spots and need people they can turn to fill them. Sometimes that goes poorly.

Right now I’m fixing a similar snafu where I’m halving a not-insignificant AWS monthly bill for a company due to an ‘expert’ doing something very expensive. Like, 2 weeks of work will cut many developers annual salaries worth of AWS spend a year. Sometimes you get bad advice and you’re growing & making enough money that you can ignore the seemingly huge inefficiencies.

> This makes as much sense as saying that a company spent $1.5 MM on five engineers for a year without a single line of code ever being written.

I mean, if you change this to ‘functional line of code’ or ‘usable line of code’ I have definitely seen that occur with one or two developers over my career.

I don’t think it’s the norm, but I do think it happens.