Joel Spolsky: Marketers vs. Developers
Translation of the next article by Joel Spolsky.
At an early stage of a technology startup, you tend to have many developers on your staff and it seems to you that there are always few developers. If you hire salespeople and marketers too early, then they are not involved in the turbulent activities of the company, and you start to think that sales and marketing is just a waste of time.
And I also thought that a software development company should have a lot of high-end developers and not a single marketer. There was a time, I supported the quixotic and, in the end, a silly idea that every employee of Fog Creek was a programmer, even the office manager should have experience in writing programs. In the US Marine Corps, everyone, even the chef, should be able to handle a rifle. Of course, this is due to the fact that cooks in this damned Afghanistan are dying just like ordinary soldiers, so it’s better for them if they know how to shoot. At the same time, our office manager will hardly ever plunge into the source code and write a class. Almost never.
Although, over time, as your product gets better and better, the more you hire salespeople and marketers, the better your sales will go. This is because programmers increase the number of salespeople and vice versa.
')
I'm a nerd, so I will explain it in numbers. Let's evaluate the quality of your code on a scale from 0 to 1.
0 means that your product does not solve a single problem for anyone, so no one in their right mind, never buy such a product. Microsoft Bob .
1 means that every person on Earth, if he buys your product, will be happier, even paying for it. Your product starts at 0 and slowly rises on the scale. If all people knew about your product, and they would have the opportunity to evaluate it, then the number of those who acquired it would be: Population of the planet * Quality.
Marketing is there for people to know about your product and appreciate it. But marketing will not affect sales if the quality of your product is very low. But as soon as quality becomes higher, the value of marketing grows proportionally. Double your quality, and the same sales effort will generate double profits. The population of the Earth is so large and it’s so difficult to calculate the effect of marketers that by the time your product is really cool it’s very difficult to find the best ratio of marketers / programmers. Large software companies can have 5 or 10 or 20 marketers per developer.
This explains why, among other things, US companies cannot expect significant savings by outsourcing to other cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China asks half as much as a developer in Sietle, San Francisco, or Boston, but product development makes up only 10% of your costs, then you get only 5% of the savings from outsourcing. Only in one case, outsourcing is of great importance if you are developing a product for a specific customer, that is, when a product solves the problems of one person (company), therefore more developers are needed here than marketers.
This is not the case (as many nerds think) when marketing is a substitute for code quality. Even the best marketing in the world cannot make people pay for a useless product.
Marketers vs. Developers
At an early stage of a technology startup, you tend to have many developers on your staff and it seems to you that there are always few developers. If you hire salespeople and marketers too early, then they are not involved in the turbulent activities of the company, and you start to think that sales and marketing is just a waste of time.
And I also thought that a software development company should have a lot of high-end developers and not a single marketer. There was a time, I supported the quixotic and, in the end, a silly idea that every employee of Fog Creek was a programmer, even the office manager should have experience in writing programs. In the US Marine Corps, everyone, even the chef, should be able to handle a rifle. Of course, this is due to the fact that cooks in this damned Afghanistan are dying just like ordinary soldiers, so it’s better for them if they know how to shoot. At the same time, our office manager will hardly ever plunge into the source code and write a class. Almost never.
Although, over time, as your product gets better and better, the more you hire salespeople and marketers, the better your sales will go. This is because programmers increase the number of salespeople and vice versa.
')
I'm a nerd, so I will explain it in numbers. Let's evaluate the quality of your code on a scale from 0 to 1.
0 means that your product does not solve a single problem for anyone, so no one in their right mind, never buy such a product. Microsoft Bob .
1 means that every person on Earth, if he buys your product, will be happier, even paying for it. Your product starts at 0 and slowly rises on the scale. If all people knew about your product, and they would have the opportunity to evaluate it, then the number of those who acquired it would be: Population of the planet * Quality.
Marketing is there for people to know about your product and appreciate it. But marketing will not affect sales if the quality of your product is very low. But as soon as quality becomes higher, the value of marketing grows proportionally. Double your quality, and the same sales effort will generate double profits. The population of the Earth is so large and it’s so difficult to calculate the effect of marketers that by the time your product is really cool it’s very difficult to find the best ratio of marketers / programmers. Large software companies can have 5 or 10 or 20 marketers per developer.
This explains why, among other things, US companies cannot expect significant savings by outsourcing to other cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China asks half as much as a developer in Sietle, San Francisco, or Boston, but product development makes up only 10% of your costs, then you get only 5% of the savings from outsourcing. Only in one case, outsourcing is of great importance if you are developing a product for a specific customer, that is, when a product solves the problems of one person (company), therefore more developers are needed here than marketers.
This is not the case (as many nerds think) when marketing is a substitute for code quality. Even the best marketing in the world cannot make people pay for a useless product.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/84118/
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