Comment by Cthulhu_
13 hours ago
I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing, testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a shortcut to inject any JS anywhere?
I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
Yeah, it’s really hard to compete with a solution that takes engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go so crazy with GTM is that it’s a shadow deployment pipeline that doesn’t require waiting for engineers to work a request, or QA, or a standard release process.
And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”.
This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.
Similar story here. I had to remind them multiple times, that the website was not conforming with the law, and explain multiple times, that the consent dialog was not implemented correctly, or point out, that stuff was loaded before consenting, etc. They mostly found it annoying, of course. And of course no one thanked me for saving the business from running into any complications with the law. As far as I know, I was the only one there pointing out the issues, as a backend dev, and even the frontend team was blissfully ignorant of the issues.