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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

I bet some clever person on the marketing team just went ahead and inserted the tag. My first experience on a large corporate dev team was eye-opening. While the core product code was version controlled and reviewed, the marketing team had the power to insert any kind of scripts onto the page without clearance. In theory, anything new on the page would require many ridiculous meetings. In practice, they could and did put in whatever through a third-party like New Relic.

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Google Tag Manager! So flexible, so innovative!

Google Tag Manager is a serious game-changer that provides the kind of competitive edge our clients need.

- Caleb Whitmore, Founder & Chairman, Analytics Pros

You want to let Marketing add script tags on the fly? Are you fucking insane?

- Anonymous Developer

That's the one :)

Tealium was my worst enemy at a previous job. 5 different departments had access to dump whatever garbage scripts they wanted on the website with no auditing by devs to make sure it wouldn't break things. I eventually put in a feature flag to nuke everything from Tealium to help us debug problems because so many were caused by rogue scripts.

An unexpected side benefit was being able to demonstrate side by side the effect that 200 extra scripts were having on pageload times.

So this is why "modern" websites take 30 seconds to load!

Can confirm. We had a single-page app that, on navigation, did just one request (REST API call to fetch data), and 15 others for analytics. They fetched JS from the tag manager, which in turn included GA's analytics.js (again, it was a memory leak so if you used the app long enough you'd end up with dozens if not hundreds of lines of analytics.js including script tags), etc.

And getting to the data, getting meaningful information from all that information the analytics team was hoarding was a huge pain. They were like "No throw, only take!" (https://i.imgur.com/q46L4QH.jpg)

Ha, that gives me flashbacks! I worked in a similar environment where more than once the production site(s) (multi-country deployment, big brand) would show a blank screen because some ad script did a "document.write". Or some hastily-added external dependency would stop working and render the site unusable.

The discrepancy between the care taken about deployment strategies and these regular issues always bothered me, but eventually things became more consistent. That is, our deployment strategy became haphazard and gung-ho too!

We iframed all the ads after a few of them f###ed with our website. It's not needed if you work with AdSense, but we had multiple vendors and private deals, custom ads of all kinds.

Then your code wasn't version controlled and reviewed.

I had a similar request for Google Tags and I explained my concerns to my CTO and voila, no Google Tags that didn't come through us.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

It depends on the market pressure and resources you have.

Low pressure, many resources (money) => Review/Implement all Google Tags changes

High pressure, low resources (money) => Marketing can do their own thing to reduce pressure on the development team.

HM and LL are somewhere in between.

Classic trade off like most of the things in software development.

> High pressure, low resources (money) => Marketing can do their own thing to reduce pressure on the development team.

"Marketing can do their own thing" makes for more work and pressure on the development team. "Why doesn't this work in production?" "Why is this slow in production?"

Nobody gets to skip CI, or work without coordination.

You're experiences differ from mine.

"Why doesn't this work in production?" -> "Because Marketing screwed up, look at this dashboard screenshot"

"Why is this slow in production?" -> "Because Marketing screwed up, look at this dashboard screenshot"

After some time

"Marketing can't handle this technical stuff [....]" -> "We can take over, we need 3 more people for that"

"We don't have the money" -> "Then we will not release Mega-feature-X".

The kicker for me is that they expect you to act like they're doing you a favor and reducing your workload. Sorry, your next release is delayed because your previous attempt at "helping" is screwing things up.

> they could and did put in whatever through a third-party like New Relic.

They didn't put anything through the third-party. It's commented as NewRelic, but anyone even glancing at the link would notice this is completely wrong.

I wasn't suggesting that New Relic is to blame. I was suggesting that New Relic allowed somebody to put arbitrary script tags onto the page. It's more likely that Google Tag Manager allowed this and possible that New Relic doesn't allow this sort of thing.

As a marketer and coder, I appreciate those loopholes to make sh*t work (I used to do it all of the time, and was pretty much the basis I was hired on at my previous job) :) although I would concede giving anyone the option if they don't have tech experience is a nightmare waiting to happen.

"To make shit work", that is where the devil is. In the same line as, "how hard could it be". Having a tunnel vision to get something fixed right now with no regards to what will happen in the future. How the code will be maintained. Who will maintain it, and such.

As you might appreciate the "loop-hole", I'm sure there are many developers whom hate it because they have to fix your "fix" in the future.

You bring up an interesting tangent that I'll speak to. As a marketer who needs to get things done, I feel you. At this organization, this was in the general interest of all of the middle managers as well. This encouraged more and more off the shelf "solutions" to be jammed in, and misorganization of the core team development. I was a contractor here, and the core code base was crammed with bandage quick fixes to the point where it was actually suggested to use Google tag manager to to change code on the fly for other third-party scripts.

NewRelic doesn’t let you add random JS, it only injects their browser monitoring script. Don’t spread fake news.

Right back at ya. https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/browser/new-relic-browser/ins...

What are you trying to show? The page describes either manually copying NR's snippet, or injecting it via an agent. But it's always going to point at the newrelic server.

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