Hacker News Reader

More efficient engineering ships features faster, not just cheaper, which lets you respond quicker, which gets you more users/clients/your favorite metric.

I think that's the point he's trying to make this.

But who communicates this to the customer? How decides what features are built (in a larger company)? Who pitches these new features to potential customers?

At a big enough company where the engineers aren't the ones doing this work, the benefits of any engineering achievement is moot if those other 3 groups don't do their jobs well.

Shipping faster is really just another form of cheaper. It isn't a linear relationship (the whole 9 women working for 1 month thing), but there is no question that dedicating more resources to a problem can help fix it quicker, especially with the frequency that companies are acquired in tech.

I am not sure that Facebook creating Instagram Stories to compete with Snapchat is a definitively better solution than Twitter buying Periscope to compete with Meerkat. Either way, you still need someone to think up those new features, communicate them to the public, and sell them to your customers.

> sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does

(I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...)

Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give linear multiples at best.

I feel once you have the "golden goose" leverage delivered by engineering in hand, you start calling it sales because that's the final step in conversion to $$$. Also, that's when the linear multiple provided by sales and marketing is the biggest in absolute numbers.

[But yes, if you call everything you see as "marginal contribution" engineering, and everything valuable "product development", then you tautologically "prove" your conclusion.]

Well, sure, if you define "value of engineering" to be more than "value of X" you can say engineering is more valuable. That would be a contentious definition, though.

Note that I am not focusing on "value" per se. I was focusing on leverage, i.e. where you can find a "multiplier", and arguing engineering is where you can find superlinear amplications of value.

It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier. It could be 10x, but even that is usually very big. Never exponential, or even quadratic (though in network effect businesses the quadratic amplification via marketing sometimes exists.)

> It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier

Have you ever started a company that successfully exited? Or managed a product from cradle to grave?

There is another comment in here about perspectives gained from taking on multiple roles. If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance, I gently suggest broadening your scope.

> If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance

more than a linear multiplier

Read more carefully.

How would you tell the difference between a high linear multiple and a low exponential coefficient? That hypothesis is nearly impossible to falsify and therefore nearly useless. The value in it is simply the encouragement to look for network effects, which are going to cause exponentiality.

BTW, ever heard of word of mouth advertising? That's by definition exponential.

Valid points. We could debate this, but I am already sick of this subthread; the point is I never said sales does not add value or that the value it adds is small, which the GP accused me of, in a rather passive-aggressive tone.

interestingly, a lot of enterprise Saas software is "sold before its built", by which i dont mean its complete vaporware, but its a very common practice to build a shitty first product, sell sell sell, and only after the first 10-20 customers are on board, do these companies start to spend more on engineering etc. Even after that, in order to sustain the machinery of building product, you need to keep selling. I think both are important, but in the technical world we tend to seriously underestimate how important sales it. At the end of the day, you can have the best alogrithms, the most elegant code and the sexiest UI, but if you dont have someone taking it to customers, and bringing their feedback back, all you have is a beautiful product without a business.

This is exceedingly common. It also makes a helluva lot of people miserable.

This is why for most software (think about anything you run in your browser/phone/desktop pretty much that isn't mission or life critical) software quality, architecture and design ZERO VALUE. In fact that value it delivers is negative since it takes time and human effort to do it which costs money and there's no money to be made from say, correctness.

I agree it is hard to draw a line between the two, but there are some decisions that occur outside of the technology inolved that I would consider product development. Twitter increasing the character limit to 280 is a prime example. There is no technological reason why that should or needed to happen. It was motivated purely by the product. Although you could argue the initial 140 limit is closer to the tech side.

I also think that many people, especially in the tech industry, don't understand the scope of functions included in "sales and marketing". It isn't just sales people calling up customers trying to sell enough to reach their quota. It is nearly everything involved in revenue generation of a company.

I agree with you about the value of good engineering, but I think you underestimate the value of good marketing.

> Sales and marketing, almost always give linear multiples at best.

Counterexample: Apple's famous 1984 ad.

I knew something like that would come up, hence my use of "almost".

But I actually disagree with your example. I was expecting something like Dollar Shave Club to be used as a counterexample, where the entire value is arguably produced by marketing.

While I don't have metrics (and it is hard to even define a good metric to distinguish the leverage produced by marketing vs. excellent product development when they exist since day 1), I seriously doubt even Apple's 1984 ad had superlinear boost relative to the $ invested on it the ad had the product engineering was not good enough to sell itself.

In fact, I am not sure if it is fair to say the original Mac is an astounding commercial success relative to other computers at its time, unlike Apple II. I feel the ad was famous for its artistic value and post-hoc success of Apple, not much because it actually sold the product.

But back to the primary discussion, think about it this way: had Mac not been a revolutionary product that carried its weight, would that ad even meant anything? As in could you even sensibly run that ad for any product and expect good performance? (This is especially relevant since the ad is pretty abstract and non-product specific, so it is not crazy to imagine this hypothetical scenario.)

Good grief. The entire premise was that owning a Mac made you different, unique. People bought the thing because they identified with THAT not because of specs. How do I know this? Because everyone remembers the commercial and how it made them feel and almost no one remembers the machine and what it did comparative to other options at the time.

You have conflated cause and effect here so much it is hard to untangle just where you diverged from reality, but the 1984 ad was not as important as you think. It ran once. Once. It became important as an icon later, but "everyone" doesn't remember how the commercial made them feel because most of them didn't see it. The Mac was, at the time, such a marvel of hardware and software engineering and so radically different than what was available at the time that it almost sold itself. You probably could not have picked a worse example to try to make the sales vs engineering case.

The original Mac was actually not a very useful product; 128K of memory was enough to get a taste of the graphic user interface, but not enough to do much in the way of useful work. There was a flurry of initial sales to early adopters on the basis of the marketing, the potential, then it fell off. Sales only picked up again when the memory was increased to 512K. That tends to get forgotten nowadays because of what happened afterwards, but it's not at all the case that the original Mac sold itself based on its capabilities as a product.

One of the most common fallacies you hear voiced by software people is that polynomial/exponential is bigger than linear, because they ignore the constant factors that matter in the concrete cases in the real world. The same fallacy leads to bad engineering choices and bad business choices.

There is definitely a lot of truth to this, but when talking about exponential growth in particular, the growth is often so huge that it eclipses any conceivable linear function in practice pretty quickly.

Also, given sufficiently large numbers, better asymptotic growth always beats. So this is less wrong when talking about huge businesses.

> The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does.

Engineering is the key multiplier.

> For example, what would happen if magically Twitter's tech became 50% better overnight?

What if twitter only needed 50-100 engineers?

What if twitter had an ad platform that was as good as facebooks or googles?

If the world had 50% better tech we could automate tens of millions of jobs.

>> What if twitter only needed 50-100 engineers?

Their IPO will suck because every wannabe big company must have lots of employees to raise more money.

I don't agree.

I'm always in an engineering role.

Yet at multiple companies I've implemented A/B testing, come up with ideas for features, implemented them, tested them, and have seen growth of the bottom line in the 10-40% range.

I've heard much from product and marketing at the same companies about the amazing things that they are coming up with and how they will grow the company. I've tested those. Most of the wins don't reach the same range.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you don't need product and marketing. You absolutely do. But if you listen to the engineers who know what you can do, rather than treat them as cogs in the wheel, you'd be amazed at what can happen.

This is partly why I wrote what I did about it being a self-inflicted problem: most engineers simply don't take that initiative, and many of the ones that do are thinking of features for resume driven development more than for the company's health. They're too busy arguing about whether Rust is our savior or how dumb blub programmers are, etc.

The answer to your original comment answered this. Engineers would avoid cv-driven-development if recruiters and head-hunters didn't use key-word based searches and rewarded developer CV riddled with most buzz, admittedly a bad thing. So I hardly see this as self-inflicted, it is wrong but that is what market is looking for.

Resume driven development is as much about developers chasing the new shiny as it is about dealing with the phenomenon you note. Perhaps more so, even.

>most engineers simply don't take that initiative, and many of the ones that do are thinking of features for resume driven development more than for the company's health.

There's no money in caring about the company long term. Increase in salary for an engineer comes in changing jobs, not internal promotion (which, for places where this is even a concept, is usually constrained by some arbitrary limit, where as job change depends on your negotiation skills and resume). We're optimising for what is successful.

>They're too busy arguing about whether Rust is our savior or how dumb blub programmers are, etc.

I know there are lame fan boys, but many of us are actually value focused and realize that a more powerful language is cheaper across the entire product life cycle. Having said that, I wouldn't feel too bad about using even Java these days because they've added enough stuff to lessen the impact of how awful the language is, that it probably doesn't make much of a difference. But you can't say that about every language, some languages are just too expensive time-wise to make sense in any setting.

> Increase in salary for an engineer comes in changing jobs, not internal promotion (which, for places where this is even a concept, is usually constrained by some arbitrary limit, where as job change depends on your negotiation skills and resume). We're optimising for what is successful.

I agree that there are limits internally, if your goal is to stay on the "tech ladder". Those limits carry over across companies once you get to a certain point, right around where you hit the "Lead/Principal Engineer" point. Once you get there, a switch to another company is more often going to be for technology and problem domain (e.g. to do something "more interesting") than for a promotion (pay increase). Promotion by job switching is less likely at this point simply because there are fewer positions of these types required.

It's different for a switch to the "non-tech ladder". Even "laterally" (e.g. "Lead/Principal Engineer" -> "(Senior) Engineering Manager") is effectively a promotion: the compensation is better and the leadership is more likely to listen. It also opens up more opportunities up the ladder internally.

> I know there are lame fan boys, but many of us are actually value focused and realize that a more powerful language is cheaper across the entire product life cycle.

This is by no means absolutely true. It depends strongly on the product and the duration of the life cycle, among many other things. Language choice sometimes has a significant impact which can be positive or negative. Most of the time it simply doesn't matter that much.

"The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does."

If you don't have a product, you can multiply zero as much as you want, it's still zero. Engineering provides base value, everything else is just build on top of it.

If you have a product nobody knows about, its objective value is also zero.

If you make a product that nobody needs, that's another problem entirely.

Whether the product is needed or not is irrelevant to my assertion.

Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius to create a product webpage, create social network presence, buy some Google ads or even start a Kickstarter campaign etc. so people can find you themselves. Being "invisible" at this age and time is only possible if you actively try to stay this way or make a product that nobody needs (I ruled out the former as it doesn't make any sense).

> Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius [...]

But your product does need some marketing, which is the point I was trying to make.

Marketing does not just "build on top of [Engineering]", they are codependent.

Of course, just as you need to sell it to make any money. I was talking about "marketing" and "sales" as in department sense, so what I want to say that you can run a company with just engineering department, but you can't run a company with just sales and/or marketing departments (in a product orientated business at least). Sure, it's probably not the most efficient way either. For example, in my previous job I was working in a small, niche company (optical equipment) that had only engineers (~40 total), CEO and an accountant and it was doing pretty good, we had hard times fulfilling all orders. All "marketing" we did was our CEO + few engineers going to the industry related conferences and shows to generate leads.

What you are saying is true, but engineers are extremely fungible to almost all organizations. Engineers are far more replaceable than founders.