There are bad people in every profession. Unfortunately marketing seems to have a higher rate of them, and "growth hacking" is probably at 99%. Anyone who concludes a test without sufficient information or consideration for side-effects—or worse, makes a change without testing at all simply because some other growth hacker claims it works—is just eager to claim another win without care for actual business outcomes.

(I say this as a customer acquisition consultant.)

With that said, engineers are notoriously more sensitive to marketing and sales than the general population, and therefore overestimate the negative impact of a marketing or sales tactic.

(I say this as a former engineer.)

Case in point:

I once consulted for a popular NoSQL DB company. When I came along, they were letting anyone download a trial of the DB without providing any contact information—not even an email. So even as more and more people learned about them, the sales team had no leads to sell to.

I set up a test in which a random 50% of people who clicked "Download" would be prompted for their email before the download could start.

We _knew_ the download rates would drop, but that's a tradeoff the company was willing to make to fill up its sales pipeline (and survive). After some discussion and back-of-the-envelope math, we decided that anything less than a 60% drop would be worth it if it meant the sales team got leads.

The test ran for two months. The drop-off rate was just 30%, meaning 70% of those who were prompted for an email went on to download. What's more, the average usage frequency went _up_ for the test group. It turns out the email form was mostly screening out the people with little interest in using the product, who would've only looked at it once or twice and never return.

With all that said, dark patterns and "growth hackers" are a scourge that I wish would go away.