Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit. If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.
You must log in or # to comment.
As someone who works in marketing. We are not ignorant to how people operate and how to get in front of them. Go to the sentence that “Management makes most of the decisions”. We’ll be aiming for the people who actually buy things. Unfortunately in B2B sales that is usually the CEO/CFO/VP who has very little time to read and learn and would rather someone call and explain everything to make a problem go away. Typically they are of an older generation and hate digital media and wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit.
That said, I always say honestly sells itself. Embellishing the truth or straight up lies will only get you so far and it’s typically short term gains.
Agency’s love scummy marketing tactics. This because it’s good numbers to them and they could give a fuck what it does to the client. They just want them to see that the graph goes up sharply for the first month and than silently bleed them dry as it flattens out and they can push more tricks or services to make graph go up again.
Inhouse teams (like me) can’t shit where they eat, so have a more genuine strategy for the long term. We are vested in the well-being of our company.
Seems to me the difference between ethical and unethical marketing is the difference between trying to inform vs. influence your potential customer.
Products need a way to find customers, and customers need a way to find products - this is the problem marketing should be solving. Instead I see businesses hiring people trying everything but just informing customers.
Nerds are some of the biggest consumers of stupid pointless bullshit on the planet.
In the 00s more than now, I think.
There was that time when combined nerd excitement energy led to Google and Facebook taking over the world.
Only if it glows blue.
Yes, but only if it is not marketed to us.
A lot of shit is marketed through forums like this; you just don’t notice it.
I block people if they needlesly use a brand name isntead of saying the group name. Do I probably have some false positives? Probably.
Have you tried UBlock® Origin™ Lite?
Nope, I only use uBlock Origin. Leave that chromium crap on that dumpster heap where it belongs.
Free software doesn’t count :p
Some employers offer intellij ultimate subscriptions. It’s even mandatory in some teams. The devs don’t have to pay out of their own pocket. But I think many of them are hooked and will lobby to keep the subscription going.
DUH
Which is why they hate us
As a former developer with probably 40 games under my belt, I’m gonna say this is a highly specious article designed to stroke egos. Yes there are very valid points being made that I can personally identify with, but they come from a one-dimensional perspective that also manages to leave out data, and conspicuously lacks basic understanding of the efficacy of ‘general’ sales/marketing, instead filling in with presumptions of comparative efficacy.
Have you ever heard of HeroEngine? It’s no longer around but the developer that was contracted to make it is working on Apex Engine at https://www.apexengine.com/
A long time I haven’t heard that name. It was over hyped at the time IIRC.
If you’re not a studio (Hero engine wasn’t free or cheap), go with Godot.
I was a world owner. I got the lifetime 99 seats when it was $300. I never did anything with it, though. The owner, Idea Fabrik, had a lot of drama. The actual developer, TGS Tech, went their own way when IF collapsed. HeroEngine did have issues such as texture resolution. Apex Engine takes the experience and lessons from HeroEngine and adds more modern technology. Some AI will be present but limited. It’s under very heavy development.
I wouldn’t use it as a daily driver (and certainly not for a first or second game) but it certainly has lots of potential. Feel free to read the website and visit the Discord server.
Nah I’m good :-) but good luck!
Thanks. I do have Godot and Unity already installed. I need to bite the bullet and start using resources instead of just acquiring them.
Don’t we all 😁. Looks at my 5 PCs…
I think many does. Specially with tech stuff when it’s not really an advantaged. Like take 6 inch screen phone. Some companies put a 4K display, but the distance we normally use phones at this density it does not have real benefit. While the more pixels on screen will use much more processing power and battery, the trade off does not worth. But “nerds” will see big 4K and think it’s better
Or like a phone with 200MP camera, if the system does do a good job balancing and processing all this pixels you get much much more noise, the noise reduction can create washed photos with huge file sizes, again the trade off is not that much.
And I think engineers in this companies knows that, but marketing pushes for “big numbers” for “nerds”
Why do people keep using the word marketing to just mean ads and promotion? Marketing is more than just that, even a software developer is engaging in marketing when they for example beta test their software on their target audience.
Yeah, I think the more accurate title would be “mass marketing” or something. There are certainly marketing campaigns that work, but they are more catered to the audience.
Valve markets to nerds all the time, but they have enough good will with their target audience so it’s more assumed to be “good faith” marketing, like they don’t misrepresent what they are trying to sell.
Look at the Steam Deck. They made announcements and over then worked with creators in the PC gaming space to do interviews and reviews and it felt much more organic. Rather than reading some dry ad or annoying banners and interruptions. It was a marketing campaign of sorts that engaged with the audience and made them want to seek it out.
Where I don’t know many people who are receptive to buzzword salads that are mass blasted over everything and just interrupt everything.
The Steam Deck is a perfect example of why the title of this post is nonsense. Ha, I added this post early in the morning yesterday and have been facepalming over the dumb title I wrote ever since.
Nice try. This is just trying to get us to lower our guard and become complacent!
Or it’s brewing up excuses for declining sales.
Ahem…. Star Wars.
I am sympathetic to the frustration with and resistance to feeling marketed to, but this person just seems to lack self-awareness… And lack of awareness in general. Not a good look.
I won’t assume he’s representative of large swathes of developers 👀👀👀
the rampant consumerism in nerd spaces seems to disprove the Lemmy title in the large, even if this specific example indicates the opposite wrt marketing by software firms aimed at developers.
The irony is that this very post is literally every pillar of marketing in one place.
Identify a specific demographic that may be under-served or for whom you have an attractive product, deliver said product to that demographic.
Here we are in a Technology community gobbling down the product (site/article) and talking all about it. Many will “share” it to various friends. Some will bookmark it, for others viewing the logo impression builds the overall consumer trust score of the brand.
We’re all too smart for it though because I said so.
As OP, I have to admit this post unintentionally leverages Cunningham’s Law as its main marketing tactic, as do many other popular posts on Lemmy. Post something that might sound correct on the surface, but is demonstrably false, and you will get hundreds of nerds clicking on it saying, “that’s bullshit; let me set this fucker straight!” 🤣
see, this just makes you come off like a jagoff.
Well, reading the replies to this post, it became clear to me that the title is provocative, but isn’t accurate. Sure, nerds don’t like ads and generally are annoyed by inflated and unsubstantiated claims, but it’s inaccurate to say that marketing doesn’t work on nerds. Many people who read the title obviously recognized this and came here to set the record straight, hence my reference to Cunnungham’s Law. I’m sure others who originally agreed with the title came around to a different understanding like I did after reading the comments and reflecting. “Hey, maybe I’m not immune to marketing after all.”
Overall, I feel like I’ve been called out on my bullshit in this post and am wiser as a result. Hope others had the same learning experience. Maybe I’m a jagoff as well for being so openly reflective about it.
This… strikes me more as self-aggrandizing than informative.
Yes, many technical folks are put off by certain marketing tricks. Good marketers just use different techniques when targeting people in this market, when they bother to at all.
We’re not immune to manipulation; and thinking that we are makes us more susceptible to it.
Agreed, it’s tooting his own cohort’s horn without acknowledging he is, inf act, susceptible to marketing. The actual topic at hand is marketing for software tools to software devs. Of course hand-waving marketing doesn’t work, it’s a technical field with technical products. The marketing he’s blasting is emotion-based marketing. Guess what, there’s plenty of other emotional decisions that will be affected by marketing in his life. Vacation destinations, artistic exhibitions, restaraunts, games, whatever. This article screams like it’s from someone who loudly proclaims marketing is dumb because they weren’t swayed to by women’s deodorant because of a YouTube ad.
You are not immune to marketing.
But you need to remember that those targeted practices are very few in comparison to the volume of neuro-regular/non-technical folks.
So we arent peone to the same bullshit in regards to volume.Maybe - but the marketing that won’t affect you isn’t what you need to worry about. It’s the parts that do still work on you need to be careful of - and if you assume nothing will ever work on you, you won’t even notice when something does take. Whether that’s buying a trinket that doesn’t actually make you happy, or joining a group that turns out to be a cult.
Always better to assume you can be manipulated, and check in with yourself periodically.
Programmer YouTubers is a good example.
We just get sold on opensource js framework with a sprinkle of SaaS (no rug pull I swear) to keep the investors happy.
They tend not to work on neurodivergent people and there is a huge overlap between NDs and “nerds.”
Guess that’s why the big guys want people to be neurotypical.
To make it easier to sell them stuff.To advertisers, humans are just slabs of meat with eyes.
To advertising companies, maybe yes.
But to the ones making the advertisement, we are the wall between them and their money, which just needs to be gotten out of the way.
Plot twist: this is an ad campaign
Marketing doesn’t target nerds. It targets their boss who is likely to enforce usage of the tool.
