Unless the dev has the authority to make the decision, what he should really do is explain the tradeoff: “Hey marketing, I know you want this feature, but it’s gonna cause us to drop down in Google results. Is it still worth it?”
Yeah, good luck using reason with these people. They'll just stare at you and say something along the lines of "But it's Google and they say so."
Tell them that it won't support all their various analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and A/B testing scripts that fill up their charts with vanity metrics they use to impress stakeholders.
> Never underestimate the willingness of salespeople to trade potential revenue booked tomorrow for real revenue they can book today
Counterfactual: lots of terrible business decisions are made because someone gets on an ideological bent and runs with it. Revenue today is worth more than revenue tomorrow. Balancing growth opportunities against investment risks is the core of commercial decision-making.
Oh, I don't disagree! But the key word in your response is "balancing." That implies there is some neutral party weighing the pros and cons of each new script, whereas in reality, what usually happens is you have the marketers on one side saying "all scripts are great" and the techies on the other side saying "all scripts are terrible," and the side that wins comes down more to which has more political power in the organization than to the actual business merits of the individual script. So lots of sites end up absurdly over-monetized and others absurdly under-monetized, with very few finding a sweet spot in the middle.
It's just another case of people hiding behind a computer; For some weird reason people trust things when "computers say them" much more than when their coworkers do.
