I cannot stress how useful this is. When I came to the SF Bay Area I was working for Intel, but I too felt that some day I wanted to run my own company. My job at Intel was an engineering job but I spent all day interacting with the marketing group and the design engineers as a liason. I realized I had some built in assumptions about how 'easy' marketing was and I didn't even know what they did.
When I was recruited into Sun I had a choice to either take a job offered by Marketing (Carol Bartz was my boss' boss :-) or the kernel group. I chose Marketing because I really wanted to learn that skill. It was a hugely valuable choice. After 18 months I decided at my heart I was an engineer and switched over to the systems group, but having that knowledge gave me a new found respect for what marketing folks have to do, day in and day out.
That in turn let me recognize the difference between good marketers and mediocre ones, and to understand what they needed from engineering to communicate to future customers.
Killer story Chuck. You should write a post of your experience. That stretch in Sun's history is always something that fascinated me - never get tired hearing stories from that period.
When I was recruited into Sun I had a choice to either take a job offered by Marketing (Carol Bartz was my boss' boss :-) or the kernel group. I chose Marketing because I really wanted to learn that skill. It was a hugely valuable choice. After 18 months I decided at my heart I was an engineer and switched over to the systems group, but having that knowledge gave me a new found respect for what marketing folks have to do, day in and day out.
That in turn let me recognize the difference between good marketers and mediocre ones, and to understand what they needed from engineering to communicate to future customers.