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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt marketing people are spinning up AWS instances.

Once they're convinced it's the fastest and easiest way to have a wordpress instance they can publish to as they please, they most certainly are. Or, as in the example, they get the idea that having a database they can analyze will unlock key insights that will drive market share.

It doesn't matter if any of this is true. What matters is they believe it and it leaves them feeling empowered enough to invest.

It's not that difficult to do, it's literally day one of a "learning SQL and databases" course. You don't need that much tech savvy to follow a tutorial and start queries in what is a basically a big fancy excel workbook

Why would they do that instead of using some SaaS that promises to do everything better like Snowflake or Tableau or whatever?

Because when they want to get work done they're going to use the first Google result, not spend a week scrutinizing SaaS options.

I don't think spinning up an AWS instance to do that would be the first Google result though.

And the first Google result will be the marketing blog of a SaaS talking about the business value brought by that SaaS, not a how to tutorial on spinning up an AWS EC2 and installing stuff inside.

marketing orgs often have at least engineering-adjacent people in them. And often they're just disconnected enough from the rest of the engineering org to make mistakes like this

10 years ago, the best tech skills on the marketing team were held by the person who knew Excel really well, including VBA calls to remote data sources. Maybe they were coding from copy/paste examples, but they were coding.

Today, give that person an AWS account and they can absolutely build cloud-based data solutions by clicking around and following SO posts. Add ChatGPT to guide them and the sky is the limit…on how much data they can expose.

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