The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does. A tech company's growth is rarely due to the technical excellence of their product. There are obvious exceptions at the extremes, but very few of us are working for a Pied Piper with some truly amazing competitive advantage in technology.

For example, what would happen if magically Twitter's tech became 50% better overnight? That would certainly reduce costs, but would it lead to any growth? Would the average person use the service more if the tech was better? Would companies buy more ads? Would revenue increase?

Now imagine their product development, sales and marketing teams became 50% better. They could have actual product improvements beyond doubling Tweet length. They could instantly sell more ads. They could increase external partnerships to bring more attention to the platform. They would have all sorts of opportunities for added revenue and growth.

(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.]

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.

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

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

Counterexample: Apple's famous 1984 ad.

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.)

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.)

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.

more than a linear multiplier

Read more carefully.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Like software engineering. And like writing software, some people are better at it / enjoy it more than others. Software engineers and good salespeople are very well compensated because they're hard to replace.

> I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can't be true for all companies. It is like everyone thinking that they are above average, it is just not possible.

Most companies, particularly most start-ups, suck at sales. "Great engineers, shit sales" is a more common failure mode in Silicon Valley than "sold something couldn't be built." Also, "good at sales" isn't a one dimensional metric. There are different sales processes, some of which some people (and consequently companies) are better at than others.

> If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product

You're conflating how essential a step is to a process with how valuable it is. Mediating those factors is how difficult it is to replace the parts in the step. Consider, for example, an automobile assembly line. It would be incorrect to assume that just because the vehicle is useless without an engine, it is impossible for anyone to be more valuable than the person who mounts the engine.

Bad, derivative products hocked by hopelessly deluded people playing startup accounts for most failures. Over promise and under deliver kills even more.

Few truly good products fail because even a bad sales team can sell a good company to a bigger company that can capitalize on the deal.

there are many good engineers, but they are very difficult to replace. in addition, more engineers does not always translate to faster delivery, so there is a natural limit to how many should exist to build out a specific product.

there are also many good salespeople and they can be trained in much less time and there can be many more of them.

This is probably the most "I'm a technical founder and I have something to say!" thread I've seen here in a while.

These engineers tend to find themselves well compensated. They aren’t representative of most coders in the Valley. Similarly with salespeople, you have lots of meagrely-compensated glorified customer service people and then people with difficult-to-replace relationships.

Anecdote as counter-example: a previous employer was approached by a vendor which offered a solution developed by "former NASA specialists" (I think it was to manage inventory). The total cost of deploying it was around a million.

We tried hard to stop the executives from going ahead with it, but around $400k had been paid by the time we managed to kill the project when it became clear that a. the vendor did not actually have a product and was using us as the R&D guinea pig, taking advantage of the data from millions of our customers and b. the "NASA" part referred to one of their developers who had briefly interned with a NASA contractor.

So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value" (in the sense of hard revenue in their bank account) without engineering being involved.

Yes, it's called "fraud".

Though IMO the mercenary freedom exists only in theory as the true freedom which makes it worth it is blocked by the inane interview processes that develepers impose on each other. There is a dissonance in the way technical skills are supposed to be some sort of objective measure and the moat digging this culture creates. (It specifically allows in only a certain class of "technical")

Though taking a few steps back these are all first world in first sorld problems. :/