
I hate marketing - mobitar
https://listed.standardnotes.org/@mo/222/i-hate-marketing
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munchbunny
As a programmer, I definitely empathize, but I feel like the author (Mo Bitar)
under-appreciates how much his perspective is a consequence of his specific
background.

This comes up all of the time in conversations with my girlfriend. I find the
"slow crawl" of managing personal relationships exhausting, but I do it
because I recognize its long term necessity. I'd much rather just dive into
hard engineering problems to solve because I understand how the journey will
look.

But that's only because I've spent many, many years mastering dealing with the
uncertainty inherent to engineering! Well, programming, in my case. How do you
know that XYZ will work? You don't really. Most of the time you're just pretty
sure it will work after you deal with the unanticipated complications that
inevitably come up. As you get more experience, you get better at anticipating
complications, but they're still there. And industry best practices keep
moving for better or worse reasons, and it's still a rat race because the bar
for what you should be able to pull off keeps going up. In practice, there are
so many layers of abstraction in programming work that there's actually not
much certainty. The confidence you get is really about your process for
learning, debugging, and thinking through the problems when they happen.

My girlfriend looks at the engineering process and thinks "I'm not sure I'd be
able to mentally/emotionally deal with the constant technical setbacks." But I
see the same patterns when I watch her doing business development work. She's
playing a very intentional the long game: keeping in touch with a large number
of key people in the industry, trying and constantly adjusting how she talks
to people, and slowly building towards what she actually wants over the course
of many conversations with many people. From my bystander's perspective, I can
see that she does it very deliberately. It doesn't always work. Sometimes
there's just no social rapport, or maybe they're just uninterested, or flaky,
or have ulterior business motives. But it's no accident when it works out in
the end. She never really doubts that she can figure it out, even though she
frequently has doubts about specific meetings or calls.

I've done solo projects before where I also had to do marketing and
evangelism, and I don't actually think it's less predictable than programming.
It just requires a mindset that is willing to deal with human problems, where
failure means maybe _those particular humans_ aren't viable paths to success
anymore. I know I'm not talented at it, but I've worked with people who are
talented at it, and that just makes me appreciate their abilities more.

~~~
mobitar
Interesting perspective. That does make sense. I guess what's really hard for
me is doing both. And when I try to do both, I only end up doing the
engineering part well, and botching the social part.

------
jv22222
Don't do marketing, just do this:
[http://lucksurfacearea.com](http://lucksurfacearea.com)

~~~
mobitar
Hmm, that's interesting.

