Where can we find CS practitioners like this now?

Controversial question from someone not as informed on the state of current as most here:

Anyone thinking of switching to a browser that doesn't have any script-interpretation ability? (Text-only or html/css only?) What options are currently out there?

Firefox works just open about:config and turn off javascript. Sadly you will quickly find most of the modern internet breaks under these circumstances.

Curious what about his description appealed to you?

>>Light side: Closing the loop between what the customer wants, what their actual problems are, and what engineering and manufacturing can deliver.

>Marketing seems to have given up on that sort of effort years ago.

Marketing hasn't, but companies' hiring and organizational structure decisions have - especially tech companies.

As long as the only marketing personel a company hires are advertising personel, given authority and responsibility for advertising only, the loop can't be closed.

In tech, programmers are the "engineering and manufacturing", but they tend not to want to be told what consumers want by the marketing team (who, if hired and authorized properly, would be doing rigorous independent research and data analysis using data from that research, user data, and bought research, to come by those insights...)

> In tech, programmers are the "engineering and manufacturing", but they tend not to want to be told what consumers want by the marketing team

This is true. In fact, I'm currently engaged in a bit of a battle over this very thing at my current employer (I'm a software dev). They're hiring a brand new marketing team, but all they've been hiring are salespeople, and I've been pushing them to be sure to include someone who will do actual market research that we devs can use to inform product design.

That is a good thing to push for because while they overlap Marketing != Sales. A good marketing person is absolutely worth it.

Thoughts after thinking about this comment and thread for a day:

Has the time come for wiki directory of non-commercial (possibly: advertising-free, cookie-free) sites with robust, actually valuable information, and other sites that are doorways to them (think: topical forums, even revived webrings, etc)? Could this feasibly get enough action to be useful?

Think about the proliferation of various "awesome" lists on Github.

Some of them are curated and awesome. Some, less so. Likely some of them are even spammy.

The need is realized, but execution is hard.

Yes. I was looking for a modern _human_ curated directory of web content just the other day and found nothing usable. I don't think that excluding commercial entries would be necessary, but perhaps there could be some way to filter commercial entries out. Ad-free, JS-free, and cookie-free would be ideal.

I recommend: https://href.cool/ as a sick (though highly particular) example.

Although it's early days for this project but do check out: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome

Just curious – what content exactly would you be interested in? If any other poster wants to chip in with suggestions, feel free.

I think you should talk to kicks @ https://kickscondor.com/.

Last decade, legislation settled on requiring bloggers to disclose all sponsored posts.

> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.

Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.

Advertising - including subsets of advertising like including models or playing on insecurities - is only a small subset of the discipline of "Marketing". Most of Marketing is about finding out what people want and need, how to deliver it, and how to let people know your delivery of their need-fulfillment is available.

Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.

Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.