A Layoff in the Smith Family Ripples Through Town | Hacker News Reader

A Layoff in the Smith Family Ripples Through Town

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6 pointsChaitanyaSai3 comments

This is something I just do not understand:

Mr. Smith had earned about $90,000 at Metrostudy. His wife, Kimberly, earns about the same at a retail marketing firm.

If the money in the checking account wasn't enough to cover it, well, that's what credit cards were for. They accumulated more than $25,000 in credit-card debt.

Good article. One thing that struck me, though, was the nature of the jobs both workers in the Smith family had:

"Metrostudy, the housing market research firm where he worked as a staff consultant"

"His wife, Kimberly, earns about the same at a retail marketing firm"

In other words, they both had these kind of meta-jobs which don't actually do much of anything productive, just kind of massage the system. This kind of job just doesn't seem like it has much of a reason to exist long term, to me at least - they're both kind of dependent on trying to influence/predict imperfect markets. Well, those markets are rapidly becoming more perfect, information-wise anyway - we see the beginnings of this process in Amazon reviews.

Market research is important, don't get me wrong - even if (when?) advertising is completely ineffective, companies still need to know what customers want. But it just seems to me that in the long term, these kind of jobs are against the technological tide.

Job titles rarely delineate what the job actually entails. When I worked at the 2nd largest hotel chain, they only had 8 guys in market research and about 12 in database marketing. These 20 people determined what hotel customers wanted, what franchise owners wanted, how much cash to keep liquid for priority club reward points, which customers to contact during direct mail campaigns, and wielded technology & math like you wouldn't believe.

I never thought these marketing guys did anything productive either until I worked side by side with them. These guys eat & sleep statistics and dream of k-means clustering and p-values all day long. My boss coauthored a paper about lifetime value of an average hotel customer with a university professor. Sometimes it's hard to judge a marketing job title until you've actually experienced the real thing.

I was hired to automate their data scrubbing and SAS models. They had 3 full-time programmers to help marketing research with the 30 terabytes of customer data they had collected over the last 10 years or so.

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