
Ask HN: Overcoming engineer/developer bias against SEO - randfish
I was out to lunch today with a fellow startup CEO who commented that our company (SEOmoz) was likely having a much harder time finding remarkable engineers to hire due to the negative perceptions about SEO as an industry and business practice. In his experience, even very smart, talented people from this background tended to have closed minds on this topic.<p>Since we specifically discussed the Hacker News community, I thought it valuable and worthwhile to post here and see if the community had opinions on the topic and, perhaps, could share ways in which we could help overcome it.<p>My sense is that HN is generally filled with smart, open-minded people who love applying science and technology to marketing (or any other problem), yet SEO (and web marketing as a whole) seems to attract derision, often without context.<p>Love to hear your thoughts.<p>---<p>RE our specific situation: We're hiring primarily for folks to work on our web crawl, processing &#38; machine learning platforms (as well as some front-end applications that plug into these systems). A good comparison would be Google's/Yahoo!'s/MS's teams in the early days working on 50 billion+ page indices, metric construction, crawling, serving, etc. We've heard that these are typically interesting, sexy problems, but that the "SEO" industry bias is working against us.
======
briandoll
Here is why I would never personally work for an SEO company: (Obviously just
my opinion, with all the bias that carries)

Search engines are very interesting, technologically. Optimizing a search
engine would be extremely interesting. Optimizing websites to keep up with the
changes of somebody else's business (the search engine) is not interesting.

You're playing catch-up. You essentially attempting to reverse engineer
interesting problems, and applying methods to take advantage of the internals
of those algorithms for your customers.

In 1999 you would have been wildly successful telling people they could put a
ton of keywords on their website, using the same font color as their site
background color to boost ranking without affecting user-visible content. That
worked, for a while. Then it didn't. The technology to "optimize" content for
search engines have changed, but the concepts are still the same. You're
trying to game the system, and I personally don't find that interesting nor
rewarding.

~~~
randfish
Fair points.

We're working to figure out what works and provide software to message that
and help businesses optimize. It's not just for search engines (we try to help
with, for example, how/why people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB,
etc), but the point is a reasonable one; optimizing against existing systems
vs. creating something new may be part of the issue.

Thanks for sharing, Brian.

~~~
dejb
> It's not just for search engines (we try to help with, for example, how/why
> people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB,

... and how to get a popular item on news.yc :) I guess it just goes to prove
your point that you can can promote your brand without being spamy.

------
modoc
The biggest issue is the difference between:

SEO=link farming, spamming blogs, generated blogs/sites, etc...

SEO=building accessible standards compliant markup, making it easy for people
to find content they were actually looking for, etc...

My gut reaction to hearing "SEO Company" makes me think of #1, even though I
know "good" SEO is really just good page development, good content, good use
of keywords, etc... As an engineer I'd prefer to hear about standards
compliant markup, accessible (508/WAI), canonical URLs, clear DOM structure,
and developing content to better serve users: which is really what it's all
about.

~~~
ronnoch
You're exactly right about the difference, and I'd add that bias against SEO
is dangerous in the second case because the good kind of SEO is absolutely
critical to the success of most sites.

Catering to the user and offering content / services that people want should
be the #1 priority, but if Google doesn't index your site properly then the
people who want it will never see it.

~~~
dedward
Except, just as with SPAM, clever SEO strategy can be far more than just best
practices. The right ad-buys and keywords at the right time in certain
businesses can generate _extremely_ attractive CPA numbers compared to other
methods of marketing.

Yes, it's a bit of evil mixed in with good - what marketing isn't, but but it
can be extremely effective, especially if your business depends heavily on
search engine ranking.

Convince the client you can bring them converted, spending customers at a CPA
they'll like, without tarnishing their overall reputation, and you've got a
winner.

------
patio11
I think HN is gradually, gradually warming to SEO. I remember way back when I
was lurking here someone had a comment along the lines of they would be a
hired assassin prior to doing SEO consulting. These days folks discuss SEO
strategy here with some regularity, and it generally doesn't cause vitriolic
reactions when it is perceived as non-manipulative.

I think it is a matter of continuing to demonstrate very basic things such as
"SEO works", "SEO will make your business money", and "SEO is not black magic
voodoo practiced by a bunch of ebook selling charlatans who will teaching you
to Make Money Online".

If I were trying to get a bunch of savvy startups on board with SEO, I'd be
banging the drum on how SEO is an absurdly effective force multiplier for
startups, small businesses, and other resource-constrained entities who have
agility, deep technical knowledge, personality, a story to tell, and all the
other unfair advantages that warm me to my blackened SEO heart. If you're
doing business on the Internet, you're almost certainly critically dependent
on SEO these days. (Some businesses more critically than others: I could
imagine B2B with horrifically long sales cycles that get very little
accomplished online not worrying about SEO too much, and Facebook/iPhone apps
get a pass in today's market. But for selling B2C or B2SmallBusiness web
applications? Crikey, SEO is about as important as issues get.)

Oh, and educating people about what SEOs actually do for a living helps. (I
mentioned at the time, too, but I really liked the presentation to YC about
it.) Except, don't mention the roasted baby parties. I don't think they're
ready for roasted baby. We'll start with kitty milkshakes and work our way up
gradually.

~~~
plinkplonk
"they would be a hired assassin prior to doing SEO consulting. "

Fwiw I would _still_ choose to be a hired assassin vs being an SEO consultant.
;-)

I would rather starve than work for companies like SEOMoz. If I am a typical
good engineer (and I think I am a good engineer , not a great one - yet ;-)),
then I guess that confirms the poster's anecdote of good engineers not
choosing to work for SEO firms. Really why should they?

My focus is Machine Learning so if I wanted to work for someone else on
interesting problems in ML, I'd work for NASA/Google/NSA whoever - NSA being
as "slimy" as I'd like to get. I wouldn't choose to work for SEO
companies/Spam Companies/Porn companies /criminal enterprises etc if they had
problems ten times as interesting/sexy (and I am sure at least some of them
do).

Why _should_ a good engineer choose to work for a company in a shady industry,
given she has any choice in the matter?

If you _are_ running your own web app startup, knowing when and how (much) SEO
works (and when and how it doesn't work) on the other hand, could be very
useful (as patio11 correctly points out), depending on whether you think it is
the best way to spend your time.

If I were running a startup (I am not, presently) and if Search Engine based
marketing were an important part of my marketing strategy, sure I'd spend some
time on it (again patio11 has written some incredible posts on how to do this,
thanks much!). But I'd still see it as a necessary evil rather than something
intrinsically good, and I'd never work on this stuff for other people.

Getting muddy on the way to some place important is one thing, making a career
of jumping into slime pits for random strangers every day is another.

~~~
webwright
This is the first time in a long time I wish I could downvote multiple times.
SEO is not intrinsically good or bad-- it's a tool (and a powerful one). Like
sales. Like TV advertisement. Like PPC marketing. Like display ads. Like PR
professionals.

Sure, asshats can use tools for evil. People get killed by kitchen knives all
the time-- but that doesn't make the tool intrinsically evil.

------
throwaway123
Let me explain why I have learned to hate SEO over the years.

I'm writing this from a throwaway HN account. I work for a 4-year old company,
where I was one of the first 3 employees. We have a very popular website that
gets over 400 million page views per month. We get lots of traffic from
Google. When I started, our priority was making a great, simple user
interface. But we were also very aware of SEO, and paid much attention to
self-links we put on the site, anchor text, URL parameters, all the usual
smart SEO stuff. So far so good -- we did this opportunistically, and never at
the expense of the user experience.

As we grew, we hired a person dedicated to SEO (a non-programmer). Then we
hired another. These SEO people started having us add links and pages in
strange places that made no sense to actual users. And adding links that
sometimes made sense to users, but were unnecessary, and cluttered the user
interface. The page footer grew and grew, eventually spanning 3 lines. We
added funny redirect schemes that made the site slower for users. We were
afraid of our links to other sites because we might leak valuable "Google
juice". We added redundant tooltips that were useless to users. Many of these
tactics were crap our SEO people read on some webmaster SEO forum, with no
scientific basis. Sometimes our SEO people even had the gall to say "I have an
idea I think will be better for the user experience", and go on to propose
something that only benefited SEO, and made the user experience worse! In
other words, they would focus on GETTING the user (via Google), but forgot
about KEEPING the user (through good user experience). Thankfully, we never
did the black-hat methods like cloaking, but some things very close were
proposed and met with loud opposition from our developers.

For a long time I would fight against these changes, because they made the UI
worse. I lost most of these battles because it was hard to convince the
managers that it was hurting the site (but it never seemed to be necessary for
the SEO people to prove it was actually helping SEO). I was eventually
spending so much energy fighting these SEO proposals that I just gave up. User
interface designers and developers spend a lot of effort to make a web site
look good and run fast. Then the SEO people go and fuck it up. It's very
frustrating for developers. I know SEO is important. All I'm saying is that
SEO should never be at the expense of the user experience. I hate what it has
done to our web site, and I know it's happened to other websites as well.

~~~
CyberFonic
Did you try A-B testing to verify that the SEO tweaks actually did produce
improvements? Seems to me that the absence of testing makes it difficult to
verify the improvements that any specific SEO attempt might make.
Unfortunately, there are too many SEO 'hand-wavers' trying to cash in on the
widespread ignorance. From what I've seen genuine SEO results are a lot harder
work than the SEO-oil salesmen would admit.

~~~
nostrademons
I'm kinda curious how A/B testing for SEO works. You can't show one version of
your site to half of Google and another to...er, the other half of Google? I
suppose you could measure your search referers one month, make the change, and
then measure it the next month, but your data will be very noisy. You're
likely to get more searchers coming later simply because of additional word-
of-mouth, traction within the marketplace, maturing of the industry, etc.

~~~
clueless
Google Website Optimizer: A free website testing and optimization tool, which
can be used to find out what site content and designs which best resonates
with the visitors, by letting Website Optimizer to show different versions of
website to visitors while tracking the performance of each version.

~~~
nostrademons
Right, that's describing ordinary A/B testing on visitors, where you show half
of your users one version and half a different version and then measure their
behavior. That's pretty well understood.

What I don't understand is how you would apply A/B testing to _SEO_. There's
only one Google; you can't show half of Google one version and half another
Google. How do you get data on which version is better _for search engines_
without being able to compare them while holding other factors constant?

~~~
Sujan
There is no real A/B testing for SEO, sorry. As you say, there is only one
Google.

You can try to simulate a 'test' with two equal throwaway sites, but this will
never give you the same insight as using it on a big site with real content
and real visitors. But it can help you find problems in linking structures,
tweak the (really small) benefits of using one or another html tag.

The success of SEO can't be isolated. But, increased crawling of the page and
disproportionate visitor growth from Google are good signs.

------
marssaxman
I'm a software engineer, and I've been browsing seattle.craigslist.org
recently looking for something new. Your ads hit enough of my keywords to pop
up in my search, but I move right past as soon as I see the letters "SEO".
Maybe your company actually is awesome and totally working for the betterment
of the world, but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to
describe the bad guys.

Your ad could hold my attention longer by dropping the term "SEO", but I'd
still decide you were probably just a bunch of spammers as soon as I saw the
words "improve their rankings in search engines". I don't want sites to come
up in search engines because someone paid a lot of money to put them there; I
want sites to come up in search engines because they are a good match for what
I'm trying to find. If you're gaming Google, you're making the Internet less
useful, and there's no way I could work for you in good conscience.

Now, maybe what you're actually doing isn't so much gaming Google as it is
teaching your customers how to build good web sites. Maybe you're teaching
them to write good headlines, use quality hyperlinks, add a lot of useful,
interesting content, get content out from behind paywalls and flash blobs, and
so on; or maybe you've come up with some fascinating statistical analysis that
lets people know how searchable their content is. If so, that's great: but why
drag yourselves down with the poisoned label "SEO"? It's like calling
yourselves "SpamWorks", or "BotNetMasters", or advertising your skills at
obfuscating Cialis ads.

Web marketing attracts derision because web marketers make the Internet suck.
Maybe you're a step above the spammers of the world, but you're not helping
your case by marketing yourselves under their label.

~~~
Sujan
Okay, here we found an interesting bit:

> [...] but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe
> the bad guys.

For me, probably randfish and lots of other people, some of them working in
this industry, the word SEO just doesn't mean this.

~~~
marssaxman
I have no doubt that you're right, but this isn't about what you think or what
randfish thinks: it's about what the people he's trying to recruit think.
Speaking as a member of his potential recruitment pool, there's nothing in the
job ad that distinguishes SEOmoz from any other company talking about "SEO" or
"improv[ing] their rankings in search engines", and as a result I get the
impression that SEOmoz is just another bunch of sleazeballs making money by
ruining the Internet for everyone else.

If that is true, then great: they're marketing themselves effectively. If it's
not true, they might not want to use terminology so directly associated with
the asshole spammers of the world.

------
smallblacksun
SEO makes it harder for people to find useful information on the web instead
of what someone spent time and money to "optimize" for Google. Developers know
this, and so generally dislike SEO.

~~~
webwright
Really? So, say tomorrow you build a better Wikipedia. How long before you're
on page 1 of ANYTHING? If you're 1000% better than Wikipedia, maybe it's only
12 months. But if you're only 15% better than Wikipedia... It could be years
or never.

SEO allows small/smart companies to compete against established behemoths in
search engine results.

Your statement is true of ALL marketing and ALL sales. The truth is that
marketing and sales efforts are a success multiplier to the quality of your
product. Yes, that means that good companies can get beaten by crappy
companies who out-execute them in the arena of sales and marketing.

You can ignore sales and marketing in the hopes that your product is SO much
better than the competition that it will win anyway... But that's almost never
the case (note the $ that Apple spends on marketing, bizdev, and branding).

~~~
nostrademons
I think people are reacting to the game theoretical aspects of this. Sure, _if
one firm_ uses SEO, it gives them a chance to get a leg up on the competition
and put their product out in front of people. But _if everybody_ uses SEO,
nobody else is better off than they were before, and yet a huge amount of time
has been wasted on SEO. And unfortunately everyone will be using SEO, because
they'll get left behind if they don't.

Many developers are developers precisely because they didn't want to get into
these zero-sum games. Think of the other professions where smart, logical,
creative people can end up. Finance, law, and advertising. Most of these pay
better than software engineering does. If we wanted to go into them, we
would've. But it's precisely the constructive, innovative part of software
development that appeals to us.

The question was "Why do _developers_ not want to go into SEO?", not "Why do
salespeople and marketers not want to get into SEO?" It's because the question
is already self-selecting for the people that don't want to do that. If we
liked gaming the system for personal gain, we'd work for Goldman Sachs.

~~~
webwright
I think you're absolutely right. I'd say that's the difference between a
developer and a hacker-founder. Look at the YC App-- YC optimizes for people
who game systems because BUSINESS rewards people who game systems.

If you leave low-hanging opportunity on the table because your software
business won't lower itself to things like sales, marketing, SEO, PR, etc--
you're doing a disservice to your investors and your co-founders.

------
kirvero
I deal with this a lot. I think there are 3 problems:

a) the underlying need for SEO is equivalent to the underlying need for taxes.
Or apartment brokers. Or other hated but essential intermediaries. SEO is a
necessary lubricant, but in a perfect world, it doesn't exist.

b) the context SEO operates in is derivative, not fundamental. SEO may need to
deal with 50b+ indexes, but the context is _not_ google. The context is
parasitic.

c) the business model and ROI calculations of many SEO companies are self-
serving, magical, non-scientific, and non-provable. I can't tell you how many
conversations I've had with SEO people where I suggest doing an experiment,
and all I hear are crickets and fear.

------
garyrichardson
At our last weekly meeting, we were discussing implementing SEO. My gut
reaction was to question the decision to work with snake oil salesmen.
Luckily, I thought before I spoke.

I think SEO needs a new acronym to differentiate between spammy abuse SEO and
site structure/good practices. Maybe Search Engine Readability? Search Engine
Compatibility?

------
throwaway321
Here's why I loathe SEO (the term and the industry):

It shouldn't exist. There's "good" and "bad" SEO. "Bad" SEO is snake oil, it's
cheating, it's gaming the system for commercial purposes. It's a race to the
bottom to see who can screw up their UX and the Internet in general the most
to get the most clicks from Google. It's evil.

"Good" SEO, though, is nothing but common sense. Search engines emphasise good
structure, semantics, accessibility and practises, and this is what "good" SEO
takes advantage of. But good developers know if you're doing your job in the
first place, there's no need for "good" SEO. That's why we don't like SEO;
it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If you can somehow stealthily
introduce good practises in the guise of SEO, then I guess that's good, but we
cringe at the thought of having to label it like that to get acceptance.

------
bravura
Perhaps your first problem is that there isn't even a "Careers" or "Jobs" link
on your homepage, and Googling "seomoz jobs" and "seomoz careers" leads to a
job board and not your company's hiring page?

Seriously, I am interested in hearing about your machine learning openings,
and I can't even find the job description anywhere.

~~~
randfish
Wow... Great point. We used to have a callout in our top menu nav, but it's
pointedly missing. I'll definitely get on that with the team.

In regards to openings:
<http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/1757631095.html> is what's currently
up.

------
divinewrite
I've worked in SEO for 6 years (I'm an SEO copywriter), and I know there's
good and bad in the industry, as in any industry. In SEO, I think the biggest
problem is a lack of respect for the audience. That's why you get sites with
poor usability, as described by throwaway123 below. But it's not always the
SEOs who are responsible for that. Remember, they're being paid by someone.
Yes, there are times when the SEO's client DOESN'T understand the impact of
the SEO they're commissioning. But there are also times when they do. It's
easy to blame the practitioners here, and often that blame is justified. But
we only have to look around us to remember that business -- big or small -- is
generally far more interested in short term gain than long term customer
satisfaction. So it should come as no surprise that many businesses are
prepared to turn a blind eye to practices that hinder usability and visitor
value.

The other common problem in SEO is ineptitude. Many people call themselves
SEOs when really they're just opportunistic freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Their SEO knowledge is poor and their business management skills lacking. This
ultimately impacts EVERYONE connected with the job, even those only remotely
connected (like the good SEOs out there).

------
InclinedPlane
Sadly, SEO is a loaded and abused term. A lot of SEO is helpful, making your
site friendlier to search engine tools. But the term also tends to include
less above-board efforts, such as search engine exploitation, gaming the
system, all the way to web spam, link farms, content scraping, etc. At this
point it's probably better to just come up with a different term than attempt
to reclaim SEO from the exploiters.

------
thinkbohemian
I see hackernews SEO articles quite frequently, i even submitted one that did
quite well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748> so i think you're on
the right track by asking here. That being the case, why don't you just edit
your post and include a "we're hiring" link! Aside from that diving into the
technical details "sexy problems" first in any type of job listing may prove
helpful since it sounds more like they'll be very technically involved.

If the SEO moniker is really really hurting your prospects, consider creating
a shell company such as Initech (generic and tech related) when posting and
wait till they're warmed up to the technology before you tell them it will be
for SEO. In all honesty though i think you would be better off finding someone
not only excited about the sexy problems, but someone who is interested in
SEO...maybe harder and longer but would pay off in the long run...if you
figure out a good answer to your own problem, then let us know!

------
petervandijck
Perhaps blogging about the exciting (and non-sleazy) tech would help?

------
pearanalytics
Hi Rand,

At Pear Analytics, we haven't experienced that at all. In fact, most
developers will tell you that they no nothing about SEO anyway, so I'm not
sure where the bias would come from. Engineers are attracted to solving
problems they've never solved before. We've had plenty of issues dealing with
external API's, Google's ridiculousness, queuing systems, data storage and
more - yet they continue to find ways to get around these issues.

You guys seem to be located where there is a wealth of talent, and with your
success - I am surprised finding the engineers you need is difficult.

I would say keep the focus less on the SEO, and more on the solution/problem
you are trying to solve, and making it sexy to the end user. Maybe that will
get some attention.

Ryan Kelly

------
mikesimonsen
Rand - It sure seems like you're recruiting sophisticated application
engineers, you're not recruiting SEO engineers. That is, this is a recruiting
problem (yours) not a perception problem (theirs).

Focus your headline on the sexy work you're recruiting the engineers for, not
the market your customers are in. Why mention SEO at all in your recruiting?

Oo turn it on it's head and address the fear in your recruiting efforts. Like,
"how can a gig as awesome as this possibly be found in the slimy, shady
underworld of search engine optimization? mwahaha."

Maybe I'm biased because I'm an SEOmoz client, but I'd imagine that once they
get past the initial hurdle that your firm doesn't fit a preconception about
SEO anyway. So get em over that initial bump.

------
Making8
Rand I believe you should consider your company a "Search, and Analytics"
company more so than an SEO company due to the context/bias that SEO has. The
scope of work that SEOmoz does is quite a bit beyond traditional SEO work etc.

~~~
randfish
Yeah - certainly. And I think our branding around software for SEOs speaks to
that, but the branding of "SEO" in general is something we think about a lot,
too. We're not just trying to improve our image or brand, we want to make the
brand of "SEO" something people like/enjoy/respect/appreciate.

------
ajdecon
Sometimes a term becomes so strongly associated with unethical behavior that
it can't be used in a more positive context. I think this is true for "SEO".
In theory there should be no cognitive bias against the idea of optimizing a
site design to make it easily searchable; but historically this term is
associated with shady practices.

One of your comments states that you want to make "SEO" a brand people
respect. I don't think this is going to happen in the short term, when the
experienced engineers you want to hire remember cursing the unethical behavior
of other SEO practitioners.

------
danielsim
Very interesting question. We founded Plug in SEO a year ago and at the time
came up against lots of anti-SEO prejudice. The scene has definately changed,
at least here in the UK. The prejudge has been replaced with robust questions
about its benefit.

As for recruitment, if your SEO solution is genuinely an arms race of
outmanouvering search engines, as an engineer myself I'd have passed over the
opportunity. Personally I relish solving problems but not reinventing the
wheel or gaming search engines.

------
mitchellhislop
As a coder, I would enjoy those problems. Maybe its a framing issue-if you
frame the jobs as you did here, rather than "work for an SEO company", maybe
that would help?

~~~
randfish
Yeah, we've generally tried to position ourselves in this fashion, but with
SEO in our name (SEOmoz) and with core values of transparency and
authenticity, we'd prefer not to try to hide who we are or what we do. We
believe whole-heartedly in our mission: To simplify the promotion of ideas on
the web. SEO is the first part of that puzzle.

Also - if you're interested and are in Seattle (or could be talked into moving
here) please drop me a line - rand@seomoz.org

~~~
ktsmith
Your transparency has probably generated more good will than you know. My wife
and I are planning on relocating some time in the next year, probably to the
Seattle area. As part of this I've already started to take a look at what jobs
are available and just yesterday I came across your craigslist postings. While
having spent the last three years working for a marketing company and dealing
with some sleazy SEO people I would have normally just bypassed any ad with
SEO anywhere in it, but seeing that it was seomoz I actually took the time to
read it.

You are probably fighting an uphill battle. Last year I had to do a technical
integration with another company and it turned out they were actively paying
something like $30k per month to an SEO company to keep them in the top five
results on the big three search engines. All of that money was going to black
hat methods such as link farms, paid links, cloaking etc. These tactics were
all working and for a very long time their sites were the number one and two
links for dozens of relevant terms with the big search engines. As those
tactics worked, my employer very much wanted us to start employing them,
ignoring the objections of the design and engineering team. About six months
later we were heavily involved in a project for another company that was
supposedly run by an SEO expert. His expertise turned out to be having read a
three year old E-book on the topic. While I've provided two anecdotal
examples, from everyone I've talked to these types of examples seem to be the
most prevalent. Or maybe people only talk about their negative SEO
experiences. It's not even cut and dry for those companies that appear to be
doing things right. Look at some of the backlash on reddit when people figured
out that oatmeal used to work at seomoz.

------
AJmorgans
SEOMoz is a reputable company and love going there for all types of SEO
information. The community is large and growing larger. Most people are
searching for SEO related solutions for Wordpress blogs and I think the best
solution so far is.. <http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/> any other tips?

------
trey
As a programmer at a fairly high traffic site, SEO is a way of life for us and
we always think of SEO implications. The more difficult problem we have lately
is the SEO vs user experience trade off. We dislike whenever SEO is chosen
over the user experience.

~~~
randfish
I completely agree Trey - I'd say that over the last 5 years, I've almost
never (maybe once) seen a case where SEO had to interfere with or detract from
good user experience. The engines have actually done a great job making this
an extreme edge case.

~~~
modoc
I've seen several instances where in order to make really nice JS/AJAX UI
interactions and flows also SEO friendly we had to do a lot of extra work.
However that work also makes us accessible, so it's not the end of the
world....

------
mhd
I think that most people here prefer "any other problem" to marketing.

~~~
sokoloff
As an engineer for a decade and a half (turned tech manager, now), I used to
have that same feeling. I believe that's because until you work with a
competent marketing group, there's an awful lot of "Dilbert marketing
department" evident. And truly competent marketing groups are only slightly
more plentiful than unicorns, IME.

Work alongside a good marketing team however, and it's night and day. I think
that they have in many cases more interesting problems, especially in the
context of growing a startup.

How can you tell a good marketing department? They're smart, able and willing
to do math, are willing to be data and metrics driven and can't comprehend it
could work any other way. If someone says to you "math has no place in
marketing", you don't want to work with that marketing department.

~~~
mhd
Indeed, the usual marketing often combines the worst aspect of sleazy sales
guys and irrational artsy types. Never mind that marketing departments have a
high female percentage, and girls are scary.

Scientifically-minded marketing seems pretty rare. Or to put it another way:
Quite often there are some scientifically-minded marketeers in the team, but
no one tends to listen to them.

------
jolan
If SEOmoz wasn't good enough for the oatmeal then it's not good enough for me.

