At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
I've been told by someone who'd been in jail a lot, that attorney-client privilege is a huge loophole in the prison smuggling economy and someone in prison asking if you know "a good lawyer" is asking for a lawyer who would be willing to smuggle in contraband during privileged meetings.
Cellphones are always interesting because of the weird game of "sorta legal cellphone jamming" with managed access systems.
Can't just jam the phones, but you can set up a carrier-blessed sorta-Stingray that traps 'rejected' phones into a sinkhole network while bounces 'authorized' phones out to macro networks. It's kinda funky and wild.
the performance degradation I've seen isn't quality/completion but duration, I get good results but much less quickly than I did before 4.6. Still, it's just anecdata, but a lot of folks seem to feel the same.
Been reading posts like these for 3 years now. There’s multiple sites with #s. I’m willing to buy “I’m paying rent on someone’s agent harness and god knows what’s in the system prompt rn”, but in the face of numbers, gotta discount the anecdotal.
You're probably right. It's probably more likely that for some period of time I forgot that I switched to the large context Opus vs Sonnet and it was not needed for the level of complexity of my work.
Oh boy, you reminded me of the tag teamers where a pick pocket would steal your bag of runes (that you use to teleport to safety), then attack you while you try to fumble a teleport back home, only to find you can't locate your bag of runes.
The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.
Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as floor tile warping).
don't forget that Corp Por was not always the dominant combat spell. For instance there was the An Mani era of combat, and while i don't remember their names bot lightning bolt and meteor swarm were the dominant combat spell for a while as well
Aha, yes! And it looks like meteor swarm was Kal Des Flam Ylem).
Its time to shine was short lived, I want to say it didn't even last the entirety of October '94. At the time it was out of reach of most toons anyways, but each individual meteor was close to instakill, plus it was AoE. The downside of course was it was AoE and friendly fire would make you red.
I remember one time in that time range getting called in because an argument was brewing between some guild mates and another guild in some dungeon. I arrived, decided to end the argument with a meteor swarm, promptly killed literally everyone from both guilds due to the AoE, and was a dread lord for a while. Needless to say, not how I drew it up on the board!
I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time.
Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.
UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots.
The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.
UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.
Oh yeah, you could tame animals to make them your pets.
One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.
Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.
Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs.
Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.
What, wealthy crypto and AI tech bros? Exactly the target audience for a company specializing in selling the ultimate solution to a mid life crisis for people on 6/7 figure salaries.
I really loathe that sales engineers stole the term Solutions Engineer which was previously used to basically mean support/services engineer (technical generalist), a mostly post-sales role. It's pedantic, but I watched it happen in real time, my company's HR even asked if we could change our team titles to help out the sales team since they wanted the more appealing title to use.
The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.
Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!
In my experience, it just entirely depends on the company. Different companies will use the same title and they can have wildly different mixtures of pre vs post sales involvement. My career has all been customer/client facing technical roles. Titles range from:
- support engineer
- solutions engineer
- sales engineer
- applied engineer
- forward deployed engineer
- solutions / sales architect
- field engineer
And that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to deploy, etc. but deals with clients.
I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those roles if you're wanting a role focused almost entirely on post-sales.
(I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the director of research at his company and has had to wear a "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)
I should probably date myself, most of this wasn't true 10+ years ago. forward deployed/field, yep, Palantir has kind of owned that. Solutions Architect has definitely been cross functional for a long time, but solutions engineer is a title that I am pretty confident was post-sales first. I A/B tested the title back in 2014 between Product Analyst (candidates too junior), Support Engineer (too much IT/back office support, not enough experience w/ paying customers). Solutions Engineer hit a sweet spot and brought in the best candidates: Generalists who aren't really sure what they want to do, but with broad access to code/product/engineers and customers eventually find a speciality they like.
Because these folks are problem solvers, the title brought a reputation which is exactly why the sales folks wanted to co-opt the title. It conveyed trust and experience. When used well, it's still a good fit in pre-sales for building out POCs and delivering value, but more often than not, it's just sales engineering where they're qualing out potential customers that aren't worth the time of the sales team. Which is fine, except that this is MY title :)
To be clear, I take this a little personally as I was an early adopter of the title. It's kind of like those folks that get annoyed when you're a fan of a band that they liked before you ever heard of them, I admit it.
Top of the funnel should be pre-sales. Our sales folks are usually juggling eight or nine opportunities, trying to get contracts signed, in our case working with AWS to help get funding, flying to customers sites, etc.
I am post sales, billable staff consultant who leads projects. I’m “delivery”. I focus on one project at a time and dig deep into requirements and the implementation and/or strategy docs.
