Thread by @danluu

I find it sort of astounding how, 17 years after Steve Yegge published sites.google.com/site/steveyegg…, almost no companies "get it" when it comes to marketing the company to potential hires, e.g., SOSP flyers:

web.archive.org/web/2021102308…
web.archive.org/web/2021102308…
web.archive.org/web/2021102308…

MS's flyer reads like it was created by the marketing department without consulting any engineers.

FB's flyer is basically a noop.

Google's flyer is great. It was clearly written by somebody who understands what grad students attending SOSP care about in an employer.

I don't think Google really has better opportunities than MS and FB for grad student internships or new PhD hires, but they have someone in the "branding" / "marketing" loop who actually knows what SOSP is and that doesn't appear to be the case for MS or FB.

BTW, we (Twitter) are also doing a sponsored session.

My pitch is that we're small, by far the smallest company with a sponsored session at SOSP, which is why our interns have an unusually high rate of first-author top conference papers (e.g.,

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1324416895013986305

).

Our small size means that you can own a more important problem than you'd be able to at a bigger company.

We don't have a flyer yet b/c we're a bit disorganized. That's probably an accurate representation of us.

There are downsides to that but, for a researcher, bigger upsides.

But, back to the original topic, among rapidly growing large-ish companies, Cloudflare and Stripe are the only companies I know of that "get it", which has been and is a huge advantage for them.

It's monetarily cheap but organizationally hard to do good developer marketing.

By the time a company hits $10B, unless a founder or C-level exec intervenes, it will have recruiting and comms/PR orgs that actively attempt to stop good developer marketing while emitting bad marketing that has negative value.

A company with good marketing sends two signals:

First, there's the direct thing signalled by the marketing.

But, more importantly, it also signals that the company has (at least in this one dimension) not turned into a bureaucratic mess where orgs do a ton of counter-productive anti-work that can't be stopped or prevented.