In some companies, yes. In other engineering-driven companies it's the other way around.

In many organizations, marketing is just asking customers what they want. E.g. ask a farmer from the turn of the century, they'd have said "I want a horse that pulls harder and eats less oats!"

They'd never have said "I want a tractor!"

It's Engineers that conceive of tractors.

Hard disagree. Marketers conceive of tractors.

They are the ones by talking to the customers and knowing what they need. They are the ones that know that one engineer has been working on a high power engine, and other on rugged, high traction trailers.

Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.

Cough meta cough

Zilog too

I would’ve agreed with you if you had swapped marketers for product managers.

Marketers coming up with ideas and dictating those ideas to engineers is just wrong

> Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.

Eh, it's not about purely engineering. Many businesses who are not related to engineering fails exact same reason. They only care about short time growth and loses. Happens all the time.

Every time I hear this horse argument I picture a horse that is as strong as 1000 horses and goes 300 miles per hour and I get really sad that they invented cars instead of just giving people what they wanted.

But remember the horse shit you'd need to deal with.

Correction, that YOU would have to deal with. I’ll be three hundred miles away looking for oats.

That being said: you are absolutely right. How quickly the externalities are forgotten.

There's a straightforward (if not necessarily easy) way to test this hypothesis. Go look at founders and see what fraction are engineers vs project managers vs sales/marketing/business/etc. in their previous careers. Then go look at who is successful and how their success is positively or negatively impacted by their experience.

I haven't run the numbers but I have the impression that "idea people" tend to flounder without a strong technical co-founder. In contrast, technical co-founders can make it on their own, though there may certainly be challenges in doing so. Those roles are also very different in terms of what you can hire in as early employees vs what absolutely has to be a part of the founding team.

Almost everything in a big organization is a team effort, but that doesn't mean you can't tease out the relative contributions of the different parts. And I think you're undervaluing the engineering contribution substantially.

That's an interesting point, but I think having a Founder's or Entrepreneurial mindset is the key to success here and not the founder's professional discipline. It's about the combination of ideas, execution, and money. No single profession owns that.

Lots of successful businesses have been founded and run by founders with no formal engineering training. They all need some level of business knowledge, but that can to some degree be learnt on the job.

I think you’re just making a case that those roles are also underpaid. All of these things can be true.

That is why I said "across my entire team". The numbers are still ridiculous.

A lot of the time those guys are just making magical promises to customers with no idea how what they want could actually work.

Then they throw it to engineering and either take the credit or shift the blame.