He's saying that sales and marketing is less valuable than engineering, not that it's not valuable, which is (usually) true. If you had to lay off a bunch of your staff, wouldn't you lay off the least valuable ones? It's not a personal decision, it's a business decision.
They're saying engineers are the "talent" and the others are something you outsource. Or that engineers do the "real work". Or that "At least they are firing sales and marketing people and not engineers.".
In an internet company, the people responsible for the product (engineers) are the talent.
In my experience, marketing people at big companies only know how to spend money. Many sales people just have expensive dinners and long-winded biz dev meetings.
Give me the sales guy who sold insurance door to door and is passionate about the product. Or someone who can excite Eskimos about snow to be marketing. The rest don't belong in startups (or any company trying to maintain a startup ethic)
To be honest, when I read something like that, what I hear is "techies are rude, antisocial, lazy and obstructive". Then you get images of guys with bad beards and no girlfriend. Because that's the inverse stereotype.
Brand is really important for an Internet startup. Perhaps more important than many traditional business -- because you're handing money over to someone you can't see, for product that you can't touch.
I'd say their brand is one of the Google's most pivotal assets. A bit hit to Google's brand would absolutely impede their ability to do business, and to subsequently make cool technology (coincidentally, there are threads about this on HN right now).
Either way, the thread's about 200 people getting fired from Google marketing. I hardly think I should get emotive on the issue, but certainly not something I'd ever feel like crowing about -- and not something I think is an "us and them", which is what this thread is really implying.
People initially flocked to Google because their search returned the best results, now here come the marketers calling it a "brand".
You know what a brand is?
A brand is just the business counterpart of a person's name. My name is a proxy in other people's minds for my professional reputation, but this doesn't give me loony ideas about "investing" in my name, making it more "catchy" or somesuch crap.
Sorry for being confrontational: I'd like to hear a marketer's honest response to unfiltered thoughts of this kind.
