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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

> the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd

I can't say I like this characterisation!

A marketing message devoid of any useful details is really one that's devoid of any real indication as to whether it will work in your business' context. And let's be honest, the magic silver bullet that works flawlessly out of the box doesn't exist. It's never that simple.

If I need a product that does SAML2 or OIDC auth and $vendorA clearly advertises their support on their product page, but $vendorB has no detail available and wants me to talk to someone in sales and set-up a "demo and chat" where it might well emerge that there's no support for a feature I absolutely need (or the sales rep will have no idea what I'm talking about), I can tell you straight off the bat which vendor I'll see more favourably.

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Well, at least I do have a very strong emotional response to empty marketing. The GP just got the wrong emotion, it's not a hurt ego, it's fear and distrust.

If I go searching for a product, and its marketing material can not answer my questions, I do expect that company (or whoever distributes it) to betray my expectations in a way that will hurt me a lot. Honestly, this feeling has a quite strong empirical foundation, so I'm not a bit ashamed of it and don't imagine it will ever change.

You are right. It's not that it hurts the ego; it's that the nerd wants to know if it solves his problem or satisfies his need.

Switching POV now: I don't expect the details to be all front-and-center, but I do expect to be able to find them with some digging.

When the boilerplate response is "let's hop on a call and chat about your problem" I drop the product and move on. I know from experience that this will be a giant time waster, because the person who "hops on the call" will know absolutely nothing.

Honestly your comment is so beside the point that I am not sure that you are not trolling.

You parent comment basically says the very same thing, that you (a IT professional / nerd) are looking for different marketing messages (actual product details) than other users.

Others, who would prefer an "intuitive" product that "works out of the box" and is "so simple" that even the middle aged house wive can easily trade stocks on XYZ (which like 50% of the ads I receive via Alphabet Ads).

> Honestly your comment is so beside the point that I am not sure that you are not trolling.

That seems pretty antagonistic for no reason.

> You parent comment basically says the very same thing

How so? The original comment said that a lack of information hurts nerds' feelings because having information is a matter of pride for them (so for emotional reasons, not rational ones). Your parent said they need information to make a well-informed decision, not for emotional reasons. How is that the same thing?

Not the person you're responding to, but those comments are not saying the same thing at all.

One asserts that nerds want to know the details for ego reasons.

The other asserts that he (presumbly as a self-proclaimed "nerd" in this situation) wants to know the details because otherwise he has no idea if the product is even useful.

If the product being sold is actually that simple e.g. "trade stocks with a few clicks" thats fine. But for anything that requires customisation, integration or any kind of technical support thats not true. You need to know the details to know if it will work.

This very much matches the stereotypical enterprise sales disaster i.e. buzzwords and flashy things sold to c-suite that are then suffered by those who actually use them and find that it doesn't do what they need

EDIT: also in this context where the article title specifically mentions "technical documentation" we are clearly not looking at the super simple type of product.

I read the comments and I agree but I would describe that in my way:

Car mechanic buying bolts needs to know thread and sizes of bolts, he does not care about "our bolts are best bolts in the world", if he would spend an hour with sales rep that feeds him marketing and in the end it turns out they don't sell what that mechanic needs, it will make him angry.

IT people or "nerds" know what they need and they have specifications to meet. Making it an "ego" thing is silly :).

Car mechanics care about the standard. A grade 5 bolt is different from grade 8, even though grade 8 is objectively stronger there are many places where they are too strong and so you need to use the objectively worse bolt. I don't remember the terms metric uses for the above, but there are metric equivalents for the same reasons.

That's a misinterpretation. Best bolts in the world doesn't mean strongest, that's where we'd use the word strongest. Best bolts is an opinion.

A max strength before shearing/failure is just another req. for the task the mechanic wants to know, it doesn't make them objectively worse unless they were used in a situation where they needed to be stronger.

I didn't want to type in a 1000 page engineering textbook. What I wrote is close enough to make the point, but you are correct as well.

The real issue is that the people who want to use the product and the people needed to make it usable aren't necessarily the same. Marketing generally caters for the former set of people, who are the people buying the product they want to sell. The grandparent post is more about open access to technical support documentation to make the product work afterwards. (In the worst case, you frequently end up with non-technical people having to act as a go-between between their vendor and local technical staff, especially in sufficiently-large organisations.)

Taking the SAML/SSO example of the grandparent post, the odds are that the only time the poster will hear of the product is when they're asked to do the integration to make logins work. It is unlikely that they will know or even care about what shiny features the product has, since they're not the expected user base. If there's simple documentation on integration methods freely available online, it's easy enough to read it in half an hour or so and figure out how feasible the setup is likely to be in your environment. Going down the demo/chat route is likely to take a good 1-2 hours minimum, and the likelihood is that much of that is wasted sitting through presentations for the product side. That's great for the actual customers, but not useful for the technical staff the customers brought along to make it work. If you're lucky, you might get to actually speak to technical staff that can explain the SAML/OIDC setup steps in call 1; often, you might well have to set up a second call to actually discuss the technical requirements if not more. With many such integrations, the time quickly adds up...

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