Marketing is scary for a solo developer

I think it all boils down to your personal professionalism and culture in the end: some people choose to go the easy route, some people don’t. Unfortunately, mass culture of both Sales and Marketing industries seems to heavily rely on deception today.

Could it be that the reason you contrast Marketing with Sales is because you’ve seen how marketing industry (and mass culture in modern marketing) works, but your sales experience was of a different kind?

I think this entirely depends on what kind of people you hire, and what type of environment you put them in. I've worked with developers who's sole focus was on just building whatever they were told, they focused on the technical aspects, and didn't care whether it would be deployed, or if the user would even use it.

I've also worked in teams, where everyone was a product engineer, which essentially just means that we focused on building products, and while the tech side was important, it was more important to make sure the product got build, and eventually used. We often worked side by side with our business teams, marketing and design people, and it was honestly the most fun I've ever had. Knowing that I was building something that people were actually going to use, just motivated and excited me.

Up until a couple months ago, I thought Marketing teams/organizations were a bit hand wavy. But recently, I took a digital marketing course at Georgia Tech, which changed my perspective completely: marketers (can/do/should) apply data driven techniques.

As an engineer, I now (at least try) to think about how the feature I'm building will impact the end-user; it's easy to fall into a trap where you are writing code without thinking about your end users.

For me, the problem is that I only do niche problems that don't have a software solution yet. That means my audience is very very small. Basically I just end up making stuff FOSS.