Technology

It's not about nerds.

Marketing doesn't work with people competent in some area, and works with laymen. You can sell someone, say, a very expensive and nicely looking thing, if that someone doesn't know exactly how to solve the problem on their own given 5x the time.

(I am such a layman and have been recently sold clearing and digging work for like 2x the normal price, and that's if we evaluate the work as done perfectly.)

So - with "AI" and such - people are being sold something that doesn't fulfill any of the basic separable roles. If they can do on their own what said "AI" does, just slower, then they will see that. If they are being sold it as a tool for something they can't do on their own, then they won't.

Like people using GPT output instead of arguments on the Internet and not even realizing that it's a stream of nonsense, because they can't reason on their own. They can't tell how a term-riddled word salad is different from a real argument.

If you've met people referring to TV experts' authority and magazines and such, then you've seen that confidence combined with blindness.

If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.

I have never felt so seen!

Marketing hacks the human brain.

So unless those Nerds aren't human, it works on them too.

And I'd say even more, marketing works best on those who think it doesn't work on them.

yes it does

Some development teams have their tools chosen for them from on high.

Oh, I feel that in my bones. Executives who think the vendors that butter them up know better than the employees what the employees want.

Commercial sales seem to be 95% about people who don't really know their product selling to executives that don't know their actual needs but want to feel important by making the calls anyway. One of the rare businesses that try to be concrete and appeal to the actual users? Sorry, you went over the heads of the executives and they are not interested.

The pattern seems to be:

• Sales people get the client leadership to shell out cash for a selection of stuff they think sounds really good for business stuff, all the buzzwords
• The staff builds a 'shadow IT' out of actually useful crap, hopefully at least sticking to properly open source stuff that won't land the business in legal troubles, but very risky the employees get suckered by 'non-commercial' usage license and screw over the company in the process.

I wouldn't say immune, I just have a low tolerance for unfounded claims, and little interest in most of the impulse purchase junk that most ads are trying to sell.

Give me an ad for good tech at good prices (and actually list the fkin price), and I'm interested.

Like OP said, if there's no price, just a "call to get a quote" or some other similar nonsense in place of a price, then I'm either not buying that product, or I'm buying it somewhere else that they list the damn cost.

"Call to inquire" can be adequately translated to: we want to sell this shit to your entire company, call us so we can convince you to do just that" meanwhile you want to buy one so you can check it out to see if it's even useful because marketing claims are almost always bullshit.

And here I was hoping this was some psychological study and not a dude ranting for paragraphs how he's the most specialest one.

Developers don't like the tool that's being lied about in order for like 100 rich maniacs with precarious tech stock portfolios to have an excuse to attack our profession, our wages, our stability. Just so they can retain the rate of profit that they experienced under covid 19 restrictions, because of us.

That's because we aren't idiots. We made them rich and theyre like "y'all could use a quality of life reduction." Of course we don't like it, it has little to do with marketing.

Marketing 100% works on anyone. If you dont think it does its because the marketing has done such a good job on you you don't even know it.

Nerds are some of the biggest consumers of stupid pointless bullshit on the planet.

we are not immune, we are just able to install a fuckin adblocker. noone is immune to propaganda.

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.

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.

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”

Clearly the author have never seen the audiophile community. $100 cable, anyone?

Has anyone been to any kind of convention for nerdy things. Nerds are so captured by the marketing and products being sold that they let it take over their personality and they can’t stop buying junk.

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.

That's why just about every technology forum ends up being a consumer board.

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.

Marketing isn't for nerds. It's for the MBA types that make the purchasing decisions and then force the nerds to implement it. They love marketing.

And every public service app and webshop should have a "developer" section where you can report bugs. I'll do it even for free you fucking morons!

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.

Here's the thing... I want to be sold something. Not anything, but certain somethings. There was a brief time when Google AdSense was new that I was excited for the experience. (I now know how fucking stupid I was, but hey, I was young).

The idea that a new product aligned to my interests and designed with me in mind would be advertised to me instead of feminine hygiene products or mesothelioma lawsuit ads seemed awesome.

I do not want your bullshit hype machine alpha male inside club cool kid image peddled as the reason I should hand you my money. You've got the wrong guy. Tell me what it does with a side of what I can do with it. And the "what I can do with it" shouldn't be "get laid".

They tend not to work on neurodivergent people and there is a huge overlap between NDs and "nerds."