Will you help me unfuck marketing?

I've spent pretty much my whole career working with developers – marketing and writing about them, with them, and for them. Occasionally I have thought about why I chose this path. Why the software engineer? And the answer is that they are real. These people are the most authentically themselves, "yea I'm a weirdo but that's me" group of people on the planet. In the sea of complete bullshit that startups have become over the past decade, developers are perhaps our last bastion of realness. Yes, they may be a stubborn, argumentative, downright dismissive people; but they are my people.

I thought about this last night as I lay awake in the early hours of the morning (thanks to my deviated septum). I thought about this because marketing is completely fucked. And we are all trying to find the guy who did this.

It is not fucked because of AI slop; it was fucked long before this. It is not fucked because of social media; Neil Postman beat social media to it. It is fucked because we have cast aside the reigns of reality.

There are no more products, there are no more metrics. There are no competitive advantages, there are no integrations, there are no proprietary datasets.

There is only hype and its derivatives. There is capital raised (anon, pay attention, it's from the BIG brands) and there is vibes. What does your product do? Who cares, term sheet in 2 hours. After all, we're the future of sales.

What integrations do you have? What does the product enable? Doesn't matter, bro. They saw the future of sales. Now please watch our visualslop of several 1 second clips of macho sales men spliced together.

This is what LinkedIn, and to a lesser extent X, has become for startups. Your job is to cook up the most ridiculous, attention grabbing nonsense you can. We went to Cape Cod for a week and here is what we learned. We slept in our office. We wined and dined 300 people. I am crying because my father passed away, here is a selfie. He was very passionate about B2B sales.

Meanwhile, I am chatting with the PhD co-founder of an open source infrastructure platform for running AI workloads (he has 4 co-founders who also have PhDs). He is planning his launch. He wants to make a splash.

Do you understand what it takes to get a PhD in Computer Science? Can you fathom the discipline, intelligence, and commitment this requires? Can you conceive of the hours of work, technical problem solving, collaboration, and genuine ingenuity that went into building his product?

Doesn't matter. He's spending his time thinking about how to put together a 45 second LinkedIn video that involuntarily hijacks unsuspecting scrollers' attention so he can compete for it like it's some scarce economic resource. Maybe we should make the number bigger? Or add a selfie with some skin showing?

The greatest minds of our generation are being reprogrammed. They are repeatedly being told – explicitly and otherwise – that all that matters is attention. The details don't matter, the software doesn't matter, the numbers don't matter, what matters is SPLASH and POP and your STORY and how you can trick someone into clicking on your $10K launch video.

Here's the thing though: YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS. You can just not play this game. You can say "no, I will not devalue myself, my soul, and my God-given intelligence by participating in this race to the attention bottom." You can write, you can focus, you can care about the details, and you can make your work (your actual work) speak for itself.

Developers are the antidote, my friend. They are unsullied by these nonsensical social media death spirals. They don't know "what formats do well on LinkedIn," they are busy building things. Half of them don't even have LinkedIns at all.

While other CEOs are agonizing over every character of their X post, wondering to selfie or not to selfie, whether to spend half of their runway on some creatives in LA who will shoot them in some vaguely MCM office space moving their hands around a lot and talking about their customers (do they have customers?)...you have people like David just posting. Whatever man, I have a product to go build. You either find it interesting or you don't.

What we need now – what we need more than ever – is people doing stuff. It is people who are anal about the details, and will argue with you over the smallest ones. It is individuals who are motivated by interesting problems, by the thrill of a new project, and by dialing in their configs just right. It is deep work, not the illusion of work, not the marketing of work, but the work itself.

So when your next launch comes up, consider helping out the cause of unfucking marketing. Ask yourself how you can contribute to actual discourse, how you can share information that's actually useful, and how you can communicate the degree of thought and care that you bring to your work.

Or, you know, the selfie thing usually works too.