There’s a shift happening that most people haven’t fully recognized yet. The skills that made you valuable ten years ago, the ones that got you promoted and headhunted and celebrated at conferences, are quietly being redistributed across the workforce. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the strange convergence of marketing and software engineering.
Software engineering used to be a rarified discipline. You needed to understand compilers and data structures and algorithmic complexity. You needed years of training to write code that actually worked. There was a priesthood quality to it, a sense that these were the people who truly understood how the digital world functioned. Everyone else was just using the tools they built.
But then something interesting happened. The tools got better. Much better. Platforms emerged that abstracted away the complicated parts. No-code solutions proliferated. AI started writing functional code from plain English descriptions. Suddenly, the barrier to entry dropped precipitously. The mystique began to fade. Not because engineering became less important, but because the fundamental act of building digital things became accessible to almost anyone with an internet connection and enough motivation to learn.
Now look at marketing. For years, it was seen as the soft skill, the fuzzy discipline, the thing that creative types did while the engineers built the real product. Marketing was about intuition and relationships and knowing your audience. It was hard to measure, hard to optimize, hard to systematize. It was an art, not a science, and that was both its charm and its limitation.
Today, marketing has become engineering in everything but name. The modern marketer needs to understand data pipelines and attribution models. They need to write SQL queries to segment audiences. They need to build automation workflows that rival the complexity of backend systems. They need to understand APIs and webhooks and how different platforms communicate with each other. They need to think in terms of systems and feedback loops and optimization functions.
The tools of marketing have become as sophisticated as the tools of software development. Customer data platforms are essentially databases with marketing-friendly interfaces. Marketing automation systems are programming environments where the code happens to be visual. A/B testing frameworks require the same statistical rigor as any scientific experiment. The modern growth team looks suspiciously like an engineering team, just with different vocabulary.
What’s really happened is that the technical complexity has migrated. As software engineering tools became more abstracted and user-friendly, the technical burden shifted to understanding how to use these systems to reach and convert human beings at scale. The hard problem is no longer building a website that doesn’t crash. The hard problem is building a funnel that reliably turns strangers into customers.This explains why companies are now hiring “growth engineers” and “marketing technologists” and struggling to figure out where these roles should sit in the organization chart. They’re trying to categorize people who have transcended the old boundaries. These people write code, yes, but they write it in service of understanding human behavior and optimizing conversion rates. They’re engineers who happen to care about marketing outcomes, or marketers who happen to have engineering skills, and the distinction has become mostly semantic.
The compensation is starting to reflect this shift too. Top growth marketers now command salaries that rival senior engineers. Companies that once saw marketing as a cost center now see it as a technical discipline that requires serious investment. The days of the marketing intern managing your social media accounts are fading fast, replaced by sophisticated operators who can build entire systems for acquiring and retaining customers.
There’s also a deeper parallel in how both disciplines have evolved. Software engineering went through a phase where everyone was obsessed with elegance and beautiful code and architectural purity. Then the industry matured and realized that what matters is whether the code actually solves real problems for real users. Marketing is going through the same evolution right now. The obsession with creative awards and viral campaigns is giving way to a focus on systematic, repeatable, measurable growth. The craft is becoming a science.
This doesn’t mean traditional software engineering is dead or irrelevant. Someone still needs to build the underlying infrastructure, maintain the systems, solve the genuinely hard computational problems. But the leverage point has shifted. The competitive advantage increasingly comes from knowing how to reach people, understand them, and convert them, rather than simply building a technically superior product.
We’re moving into an era where the scarcest skill isn’t coding ability. It’s the ability to bridge the technical and the human. To understand systems and psychology simultaneously. To think like an engineer about problems that are fundamentally about human behavior. That’s what marketing has become. It’s engineering for humans instead of engineering for machines.
The people who grasp this early, who develop technical skills in service of understanding and influencing human behavior at scale, are going to be the new elite. They’re going to be the ones companies fight over, the ones who command absurd compensation packages, the ones who actually move the metrics that matter. Because in a world where anyone can build software, the real question is whether anyone will actually use it. And answering that question requires a very particular kind of engineering, the kind that happens to be called marketing.
