Software Is Becoming Marketing

I find it really interesting that SWEs think this is a good essay. As an experienced marketer, I really disagree. It’s stupid.

The barriers to entry / “respect” angle is a weird one to go in. Obviously people will think they can do marketing if the main, qualified activity you use as an example is… /choosing colours on a landing page/. Marketers have way more important, difficult and “high-barrier-to-entry” tasks to do in order to succeed - and this suggests Tereza is totally unaware of them.

So is she trying to say that software engineers are being treated by the market like marketers?

“Writers, designers, and marketers all have wider pay distributions because the barrier to entry is low and the work is visible: anyone can try, everyone has an opinion, and only the proven best command a premium.” My sweet summer child, have you ever MET a software engineer? What the fuck do you think they do!?

Her paradox of choice implies that she’s ACTUALLY talking about software /companies/… but none of this is new information. Marketers are trained in positioning, segmentation and “finding the fit” - she doesn’t even make a point here!

The middle class of software won’t disappear. Again, she’s equating SaaS to be “all software” (as a marketer she should know better).

And finally, the most critical and undeniable evidence that Tereza is by NO means the “very decent marketer” she calls herself… “Sell services, not software”.

What? Functionally and positionally they are identical. One sells OUTCOMES. It doesn’t matter, as a marketer, whether your product is a service or a software. The product is just ONE of the 4Ps we’re trained to think about when making tactical decisions. Let alone strategic ones.

I’d really strong encourage anybody reading this interested in marketing to read a bit of Mark Ritson. This is the most irritating essay I’ve read in months.

> A non-mathematician can't even speak the language of mathematics. But in a lot of fields, people can evaluate your work with their own senses. They don't need any other apparatus.

This is an interesting point, but I think the reality is that in a lot of fields, the consumption experience is the only thing that's easy to judge.

People have always had opinions on things like the interface, the work flow, the latency, the landing page (as the article mentions). AI or not.

It is still hard to implement, and I think you'll find far fewer people with good opinions about implementation. As long as that remains true, SWE exists.

Whether the job market and salaries and all that remain, well, that is indeed dependent on whether people are vibe-coding away all their SaaS subscriptions and margins drop.

Indeed. Anyone could always build software. Some people want to do it without actually learning anything or doing any work.

There are many things I wouldn’t mind doing without actually bothering to do the work, so I suppose I can relate.

The billions companies spend on awareness, converson, retention etc will only grow and non vibe-coded software will continue to be the input (doesnt "become" marketing) into a very sophisticated go-to-market machine occupied by various players ( brands, publishers, agencies etc). Still this is directionally interesting if only aimed at SMBs SaaS.

Training is expensive, to keep selling tokens, they have to have the best model. They have to keep spending money on model training

A product or a platform could give them a moat, but they don't quite have that yet although I think they are looking to get there