Comment Re:What sorts of jobs were these? (Score 1) 164
Programmers without marketing still produce important work,
Programmers without marketing produce work which languishes in obscurity until the company goes bankrupt. For people to become aware that your software exists, someone needs to let them know. That someone is doing marketing, even if it's the programmers themselves pimping their work on blogs or slashdot. Someone is doing marketing.
they'll just have to get the word out by reputation instead of glossy print.
What reputation? Awesomesoft and their new Awesomizer application have no reputation until people discover that Awesomizer really is awesome and buy it in droves. Then their new Fabulosity Engine can be sold on the reputation they built. Until they've built that reputation, how do they get people to buy Awesomizer without someone advertising its existence?
It's just that it's *impossible* to succeed if you don't have something to sell.
Well.....that's not true across the board. The financial industry proved you can succeed for a long time without something to sell.
Seriously though, marketing is a support structure for the company, like IT. And like IT, the company could survive without that department, but it'd be a miserable pain in the ass and make everything harder for everyone.
The real problem is that groups like IT are viewed as cost centers because the costs of the department are tangible and the benefits tend to be abstract, so they don't get as much respect from upper management as they should.
Marketing produces exposure which drives sales. Generating correlations between good marketing projects and increases in revenue are fairly easy, so upper management views them as profit drivers and they get disproportionate credit.
Marketing is valuable, but not moreso than the rest of the support infrastructure of a company.