I hate marketing

This comes up all of the time in conversations with my girlfriend. I find the "slow crawl" of managing personal relationships exhausting, but I do it because I recognize its long term necessity. I'd much rather just dive into hard engineering problems to solve because I understand how the journey will look.

But that's only because I've spent many, many years mastering dealing with the uncertainty inherent to engineering! Well, programming, in my case. How do you know that XYZ will work? You don't really. Most of the time you're just pretty sure it will work after you deal with the unanticipated complications that inevitably come up. As you get more experience, you get better at anticipating complications, but they're still there. And industry best practices keep moving for better or worse reasons, and it's still a rat race because the bar for what you should be able to pull off keeps going up. In practice, there are so many layers of abstraction in programming work that there's actually not much certainty. The confidence you get is really about your process for learning, debugging, and thinking through the problems when they happen.

My girlfriend looks at the engineering process and thinks "I'm not sure I'd be able to mentally/emotionally deal with the constant technical setbacks." But I see the same patterns when I watch her doing business development work. She's playing a very intentional the long game: keeping in touch with a large number of key people in the industry, trying and constantly adjusting how she talks to people, and slowly building towards what she actually wants over the course of many conversations with many people. From my bystander's perspective, I can see that she does it very deliberately. It doesn't always work. Sometimes there's just no social rapport, or maybe they're just uninterested, or flaky, or have ulterior business motives. But it's no accident when it works out in the end. She never really doubts that she can figure it out, even though she frequently has doubts about specific meetings or calls.

I've done solo projects before where I also had to do marketing and evangelism, and I don't actually think it's less predictable than programming. It just requires a mindset that is willing to deal with human problems, where failure means maybe those particular humans aren't viable paths to success anymore. I know I'm not talented at it, but I've worked with people who are talented at it, and that just makes me appreciate their abilities more.