I am going to be sharing with you a number of funny episodes which we believe will entertain you and might even make you feel like getting ready for your own start up!
We will talk about funding and scrum sessions and getting clients to trust you in the early stages of launch and how one should stick to the vision regardless.
Let’s start with the HR piece of it: getting engineers “the geeks” and marketers “the tourists“ to work together.
While from a business standpoint they happily complement each other, they can sometimes come off as totally different species. Some people say that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, well these guys have to share the techno planet and it can sometimes really feel like they are miles apart.
Why do marketers make fun of the geekyness of the geeks?
Talking is usually not their best feature: here is the usual picture: in communion with their machine, huge headphones to stay isolated in their own bubble with heavy bags of gummy bears to sustain the endless lines of coding. Actually I am exaggerating; there is some level of communication…through the post it artwork displayed on the open space windows!
At this point it is probably too obvious on which side I sit so let’s see why geeks think that marketers are tourists…well, most of the time the marketers are talking more than doing, they make pretty slides, order pretty t-shirts, drink a lot of coffees! They are mostly loud and want to discuss things all the time…for a good reason though: the start-up marketers need to sell techno based products and to do so the tourist often needs the geek to help answering some of the customer’s inquiries.
It goes something like this:
The tourist: hey, there is this new client that would like to connect some heavy duty database to ClicData, is that something we can do?
The geek: well what do you mean heavy duty? You know, you should be careful with multiplications in JS. What is the result of this _simple_ product : 1.09*100 in javascript ? No it’s not 109, it’s 109.00000000000001. On Chrome, on Firefox, IE11 etc. Everybody should know the IEEE 754 standard!
The tourist: Gesundheit! Hold on, let me write it down. Thanks! By the way while talking about writing, could you keep on going with all these great technical blogs that you have been writing?!
They have helped a lot with our SEO and driving traffic to www.clicdata.com
The geek: like I have time for this…
Stereotypes you might think, well these dialogues are live at our office! If you are curious, do not hesitate to drop by and see for yourself… also we have good nespresso coffee.
The good news is that since they are all boys, a good gun fight can always reconcile our geeks and tourists!
Happy Dashboarding!