This article is aimed mostly at juniors. Lacking experience, you are a soft target for marketing bullshit. I encourage critical thinking for evaluation of products and services that are forced down your throat marketed to you.

Background

The purpose of dishonest marketing is to mislead you into using a product and/or a service that you don’t really need. This can waste your time and money.

Separate the products from marketing. The products themselves are not inherently good or bad. The main question is whether to use product X or Y (and how) or code the solution yourself given your specific situation: team, skill levels, requirements, etc. This post will guide you how to see through marketing bullshit when evaluating these products.

The list below is not comprehensive and I might add items later.

Products Marketing Bullshit

( in no particular order )

Cool / coolness

If something is “cool” and you use it, you might write a blog post about it. It has some PR value to you or your company. Other than that, “coolness” of a product has nothing to do with its usefulness for your situation/use case.

Our product is so much better than X

Note that often X will be the worst possible alternative. For example, configuration management tools will most likely be compared to manual work rather to other configuration management tools or any kind of automation. Ignore and compare the suggested product to other viable alternatives.

Use our product or become irrelevant / Our product is [becoming] industry standard

The message is sometimes direct but often it is hidden between the lines. This is an attempt, many times successful, to exploit fear of missing out. Learn the underlying principles then decide whether you want to use one of the products, which come and go. Learning the underlying principles will take more time upfront but you will become more professional. If you are junior Ops, learn Linux and how to use it without any configuration management tools first; learn using the cloud without CloudFormation or Terraform first; see the problems which these tools trying to solve before using the tools.

Our customers include big companies such as X, Y and Z

You have to understand what these companies are using the product/service for. It can be a pilot for example. Check for common owners or investors. Remember that big companies make mistakes too. Anyhow, this is irrelevant for your use case and your situation until proven otherwise.

Success story

The formula is simple: deep shit + our product = great success. Look closely. Often deep shit + other sensible alternative solution would also be great success. For example, configuration management tools show manual process and then how it was automated. Chances are automating using scripts would be other viable alternative.

We abstract all the hard work away from you

You must understand what exactly is abstracted and how. After learning that, it might happen that the perceived value of the product will drop. Skip the learning step and start using the tool and you are in danger: you might need to learn whatever was abstracted in hurry when facing a bug in the tool or be at mercy of someone else to fix it. Remember: abstractions come at cost.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, we have figured out everything already

This exploits your fear of looking stupid. Would you use a spaceship for travelling from Moscow to Tokyo? I guess it would be cheaper to use a plane. Even if tool X solves your problem it might cost you time and complexity and it might be easier to code yourself or use simper tool. There are probably more legitimate reasons not to use tool X.

Companies marketing bullshit

Industry leading company

Who is not? Define your industry narrow enough and you are the leading company!  Simply ignore.

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Did I miss something? Let me know here in comments or on Reddit. Have a nice day!