> If being a marketer is a bullshit job, then being a web developer is a bullshit job too.

I was wondering when someone would notice!

Just got finished at a job with small web agency. Most of the businesses we worked with were small enough that they really could get away with learning Wordpress. Hell, most of our projects were just skinning Wordpress and charging clients up the ass for it. I wouldn't call the job bullshit, since a few clients really did need a dedicated team of experts. But it was at least 80% bullshit.

If it costs you $1M per marketer rather than $100K, you're only going to hire the absolute best.

Where are you pulling those numbers from? According to Payscale the median rate for a marketing manager in Germany is €48,785 per year. A senior web developer actually makes €48,896 on average, which is about 100€ more than that.

Now if you want to hire top tier marketing talent (which are most likely consulting or teaching anyways ex. Seth Goding, Dan Kennedy) you might end up spending around that or higher. Hell, their small group seminars cost 27k$ and last 3 days, so I'm just going to go on a hunch here that getting that tier of marketers to write copy for you is going to be very expensive.

And I'm going to disagree further. Marketing is not a "bullshit" job at its base. Say we outlawed it. You're not allowed to tell people about your products. They have to walk into your store and ask about them, and you're only allwed to hand out a datasheet if they ask. What does that do to new products? I'm going to say that if your average joe tries to buy a mobile phone and first has to dig through 20-30 pages of chipset info to find out the features of it, you're not selling any mobile phones anymore. You're asking why you don't just write out the features that matter? Sorry, that's allready in the realm of sales copy. Sharing your enthusiasm about it? Nope, go straight to jail, do not collect 200$. Because that's what good marketers do. They try to understand what they're selling, who they're selling it to, and how to convey their enthusiasm about it to who they're selling it to in order to make a sale.

Now there is the argument that a lot of marketing is annoying, wasteful, ineffective and so are a lot of CRUD apps that have been churned out by fresh behind the ears Java programmers. There's a fair share of programmers that don't know about proper variable naming, splitting things into objects cleanly, designing usable user interfaces, and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of software engineers. And there is a fair share of marketers that don't know about targeting, hooks, blind bullets, cost per customer, tracking, split testing and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of marketing. Should we discount the field as useless because there's a lot of rhinestones to the diamond? Then it'd only be fair to throw programming out of the window with it.

By the way, i'd recommend giving something like the Robert Collier Letterbook a read, he goes through things like how highlighting a single trait in the coal he was advertising saved a mine or how he repeatedly sold the Harvard Classics through using half a dozen of different approaches, or pick up something like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. I personally think that the only Ninja in Tech should be a Marketing Ninja, because when great advertisers sell you, you don't notice it. Well, maybe server admins too, but i digress.