What do you mean? That as a sysadmin he should also have solved the product/sales/marketing woes of the company? You can only do so much at certain positions. Even if you go out of your way to make people aware that they are making a costly mistake, it's can be really hard to sway them.
If the marketing team does a shit job, maybe I can tell the marketing is shit, but I can't do more than trying to make people aware of it. Even with the best diplomacy skills you often can't fix that from the engineering side unless you are high enough on the totem pole. I've once expressed polite concerns about a marketing decision to the CEO whose good friend was newly appointed head of marketing, got told off by the CEO and the marketing lady proceeded to wreck our branding and confuse our customers.
> What do you mean? That as a sysadmin he should also have solved the product/sales/marketing woes of the company? You can only do so much at certain positions.
Well, it seems that he's pointedly not willing to be just a code monkey, that he thinks he should care about product/sales/marketing to the detriment of working within his position. Which is a good quality in some ways, but only to the extent that it translates into actual added value. A coder who increases marketing's productivity is an asset, but one who just points out problems without achieving anything by that is a liability compared to one who stays siloed off and gets on with their coding.
And, y'know, lots of people think that the problem with the company is everyone else and they know how to do everyone else's jobs better than they do. How do you distinguish the few people who think this and are right from the many people who think this and are wrong? Well, that's the wrong question; unless someone can actually do something about it, it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong. If you worked with an incompetent marketing person who you knew was going to sink the company and you just rode that all the way down while complaining and blogging about it, that's actually worse than being the person who has no idea why the company sank.
If the marketing team does a shit job, maybe I can tell the marketing is shit, but I can't do more than trying to make people aware of it. Even with the best diplomacy skills you often can't fix that from the engineering side unless you are high enough on the totem pole. I've once expressed polite concerns about a marketing decision to the CEO whose good friend was newly appointed head of marketing, got told off by the CEO and the marketing lady proceeded to wreck our branding and confuse our customers.