So I'm officially in our Sales Department now, reporting to our SVP of Global Sales, George Wright.  The title of this entry is straight from George, who announced at the last company meeting that I've gone over to dark side.  After working pretty much all of my career in engineering, there's a vast contrast in the kinds of people I'm dealing with on a day-to-day basis, especially since I'm dealing with a lot of marketing people.

Some generalizations I've observed...

Engineers are pessimists.  Marketers are optimists.

Engineers are trained to pick apart flaws in solutions and technical implementation.  Marketing people are eager to find solutions, and implementation doesn't matter much.

Engineers are introverts.  Marketers are extroverts.

Engineers are detail oriented.  Marketers don't care so much about the details, as long as the solution achieves their goals.

Engineers tend to think in terms of efficiency and reusable algorithms.  Marketers are much more about creativity and effectively communicating, without much regard for efficiency and reuse.

Marketers are very friendly.  Engineers, not as much.  Mind you, engineers are not rude in general.  They just don't go out of their way to be friendly.

I can't impress marketers with any of my technical knowledge, whereas I've impressed a number of engineers in the past with what I knew.

The converse:  I've impressed marketers with things that are easy to do technically with our tools.  Engineers would point out that all I've done is change a configuration, and, duh, of course that was easy to do.

What's all this mean for me?

1.  It's a lot easier convincing marketing people of the viability of our solutions.  Mind you, I spend a fair amount of my time dealing with CIO's, IT managers, CSO's -- trying to convince them our technical implementation is sound.  But since I spent most of my career on that side, I know what their issues are, so I know how to deal with them. 

2.  In college and the beginning of my career, I thought Marketing, as a discipline, was a joke.  Now that I've been working with people who have to work with the software I've helped developed, I have gained a newfound respect for them and the problems they have to solve.  Yeah, part of it is that I'm working more with direct marketing, which  has gotten more systems focused as a result of the Internet, thereby making it more process oriented and programmatic.  But I'm also noticing that they have interesting problems to solve.

3.  I have actually found myself getting friendlier.  By virtue of my day-to-day interactions with friendlier people, I myself have needed to get friendlier.  My wife notices.

So, it's not so dark here after all. 

But, the devil doesn't show his horns and tail, carry a pitchfork, and wear a red suit.  More like Elizabeth Hurley in Bedazzled. 




Still is nice, though.