Ask Slashdot: What's Your Company's Marketing-to-Engineering Ratio? 202
An anonymous reader writes "I just learned that the company I work for annually budgets ~$17,000 for non-labor engineering expenses, but budgets ~$250,000 for non-labor marketing and sales expenses. Am I just being cynical when I say that my company spends almost 15 times as much trying to convince the outside world that we make a good product, than it spends on actually making a good product? What's the marketing-to-engineering ratio at your company?"
Not directly comparable (Score:5, Informative)
By excluding labour costs, you've skewed the facts. Engineers themselves are the focus of the engineering department, whereas adverts (a non-labour cost) are the focus of the marketing department.
Seems reasonable for non-labor costs (Score:4, Informative)
Marketing and sales have high expenses. They need to buy ads, for starters, and they often need to travel around the globe. In engineering, the bulk of the cost is the engineers themselves (which is excluded from your numbers). In certain industries they might need some expensive equipment, but that gets amortized over several years.
Re:What? Non-labor means money spent... (Score:4, Informative)
If you have hardware engineers, you don't spend $0 on non-labor expenses. In fact the non-labor expenses will radically dwarf the labor expenses. The tools for some areas can cost as much as a headcount, in others it's a significant fraction of a headcount (and more fun, these are the ones where you need nearly 1:1 license seats/headcount). Then there's jobs you subcontract (backend/layout, custom components, tooling).
And all that is cheap compared to factory NRE & manufacturing costs. I easily spend twice my salary per year in protoype hardware alone. When we go to production, a small run costs more than the entire labor cost of engineering in several years. Hopefully we sell and that money gets earned back of course, but the initial outlay is huge.
Marketing can spend money like nobodies business, even excluding travel. It's amazing how much they spend considering how little it clearly does. But unless you're doing software I would be very surprised if you compared department budgets and Marketing spent more than Engineering (counting MFG as part of engineering, as some companies do).
Re:non labour? (Score:3, Informative)