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Comment by bgun | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!

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Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.

I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.

I mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms.

I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?

> focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course

A good example of bad that can happen but damn is that just plain lazy.

More recent examples are surely more relevant and would generated more discussion.

For someone just learning about the Therac-25 incident, what more recent cases would've worked better to foster discussion that can also be read about?

I'd like to learn this too.

But off the top of my head - Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar. The various collosal data breaches that usually have token punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

Mass surveillance and face identification by private companies for law enforcement eg https://www.auror.co/role/loss-prevention You can't appeal it and they don't respond to requests for your records (like a government department would).

Social media and addiction to it. How this should be managed with vulnerable groups, eg children?

I'm sure there are numerous better examples out there.

I agree that software engineering isn't exempt from warranting serious introspection as to the world that a given project is enabling. I do not agree that we should simply throw up our collective hands and say "Oh well, everyone is complicit." Professional endeavours causing interpersonal harm and enabling exploitative behaviour should be called out and forced to bare the reputational cost wherever and whenever they occur.

Engineer does 40 outreaches in a week and says the results are “not that amazing” lol.

If I said that I coded for 15 minutes a day for a week and wasn’t impressed by the results, what would an engineer say?

I do 40 personalized outreaches in two hours.

Edit: I shared a couple details in my other reply under this post

It sounds like you have a system. Is it effective for you? What does your system look like?

You can do this pretty easily with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s not complex at all and works extremely well.

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