This article is almost insinuating that only the developers work hard, but the other people at facebook are just coasting on the developers hard work. The fact is, other people can bring a lot to a company as well. Where do the developers think the money comes from, not from writing great code, but getting advertisers interested.

Sure, but the advertising platform itself doesn't exist without the developers. I didn't really catch the insinuation you caught. I read it as just that the developers were getting snubbed in favor of the "a-list" personalities, when they should be peers.

An argument can be made that the product, and the underlying code that comprises it, is what actually brings advertisers in. Not salespeople.

And the other 99% of the time sales is king.

The users that use and the advertisers that advertise don't care 1 bit about the backend.

Wow really? So they would use a completely terrible product too if that's what it was? I don't see too many people clambering to advertise on Myspace

You'd be amazed at how many terrible products stay afloat simply because they get the job done, people don't know about alternatives, are too lazy to change, and the cost of change isn't worth it. Especially in enterprise. I'd venture to say it's way more common than not.

I completely agree, though I find that reality quite sad, but yes bad products often do succeed in spite of themselves.

What I'm just saying there is definitely huge value, sales wise, in having a good well built product. The bold statement the parent made that the backend of Facebook doesn't matter to the people or advertisers who use it is flat wrong. If it was slow, constantly crashing or down it would become a ghost town relatively quickly. In the end sales cannot compensate for a bad product, the product is always king in the end.

As to your comment, I like to use the analogy of a land rush to describe the software technology landscape right now. There is a lot of open land and so many people get away without having to seriously compete, particularly if they are solving niche problems. There is still a lot of land out there, this is also a reason that makes forming start-ups so attractive right now.

> I don't see too many people clambering to advertise on Myspace

Myspace is dead because users no longer think it's cool / trendy / view it as old / a dead-end.

> So they would use a completely terrible product too if that's what it was?

Absolutely. Sales/marketing is always king. Make something new / cool / exclusive / etc and you'll have a winner.

Users do not care 1 bit about the backend.

You are suggesting that sales and marketing people built all of the features and "coolness" that Facebook has but Myspace doesn't. There is no "just back end" in software development. It's largely a myth.

That is what I tag as(the inception of) a Stupid Arguement, pretending a unit of a whole is 'better' than another unit(not sub-unit), and ignoring Context. A successful FB is made of both the working business and the working tech ends. They may not be equal but it's up to Context(actual facts) to determine which end is key to the 'success'. But then we are humans, we have opinions and egos. Oh and the title used 'All'.