Marketing to developers

I just got a piece of marketing schlock in my inbox today from Salesforce.com


Code Warriors: Have We Got a Challenge for You!

By now you've heard the buzz and excitement about Force.com Sites, and may even have attended our recent Sites Developer Preview Webinar. Now be among the first to get hands-on with this ground-breaking technology:

Enter the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge—and broadcast your stellar coding skills to the world! We'll reward you with hero status on Force.com developer Web sites and blogs, plus a terrific prize.

<and it goes on and on and on....>

Stuff like this drives me, and most good developers I know, crazy.

Look, the majority of developers I know are not warriors. They couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Like King Arthur's nights, a vicious rabbit could decimate most of them.

There is no buzz and excitement from anybody I personally know about Force.com Sites. First I heard of anything resembling buzz and excitement is in the email that came from Force.com.

Most people with stellar coding skills are working on operating system kernels, 3d rendering images, games, bio informatics, genetic algorithms, language compilers or interpreters, etc. They most certainly aren't working on web apps that mainly consist of gluing API calls together. Product catalogs and surveys don't exactly stretch the grey matter.

I'm guessing the people that buy into this stuff are probably the development managers that usually receive this stuff and, well, since salesforce.com might be part of some strategic direction, the developers get this email forwarded to them and they are "encouraged" to enter. I got this in my inbox because I work at a small company and, for good or ill, I get to deal with most of this stuff directly. The only reason I even opened it was because I thought it might make good blog fodder. Most of this kind of stuff is insulting to the intelligence.

Code Warrior. Sheesh. Now where did I leave my swords...