41–50 of 106 posts
Does anyone think this is overly optimistic or unrealistic?
The trouble with thinking "I have magic beans, I just need water!" is that you don't understand water. You don't know good water from bad. You don't really know how much water to use and when. You can't watch the beans grow and adjust your watering schedule because you think it's all about the beans. You don't get water. That's my problem with "I just need a programmer" entrepreneurs. I can work out how to get paid,…
More like regular beans and magic water.
BizDev guy says he needs one of them "programmers" who can code and don't talk back to him. BizDev guy knew almost nothing about software development or the "properties of a system software". Business didn't work out because the software is flacky. BizDev guy blames them "programmers" when changes are hard, software is super buggy.
BizDev thinks he's awesome cause he has 3 things: Money, Network and Idea. Everybody should bow down to Money.
Programmers became hateful against the BizDev guy. They say "I can do this by myself, screw you guys". Then programmers try to re-create their ideal world: solving cool problems, working with cool gadgets, in a cool office environment. Some said programmers have to work in a close office, alone GASP. Of course these silos came up with a chunk of code that probably hard to be integrated. Them programmers try to hire BizDev guy cause now the VCs are on their butt asking how money could be made. Of course it'll be hard for them programmers to hire BizDev since they have a very strong bias. They probably ended up hiring Sales Engineer instead of bright BizDev.
Programmers think they're awesome cause they have 3 things: Knowledge, Skill and Idea. Knowledge is everything they say.
This... is why 9 out of 10 startups failed. That 1 startup that succeed? the BizDev guy has an MBA and BS in CS or EE. The Programmers? they took minor in economics/commerce or accounting.
Wow, I'm really impressed how quickly this page loads! Or, maybe I'm just too used to the masses of those annoyingly slowly loading blogs.
Also it doesn't have dozens of plugins like so many blogs, so it's not hitting Facebook, addthis, last.fm, etc.
I see a lot of "just learn to program" around here, and I think it's all a bit glib and far from reality. Firstly, programming is hard . It's not the sort of thing you pick up in a few weeks. Hell, there are people who manage to make it through a CS degree and several years in industry without actually knowing what they're doing. What makes you think it's a valuable use of your time to do something mediocre that othe…
Is it that coders confused the good business guys with the charlatans, or is it that it's difficult to tell them apart? Much like business guys can't tell good coders from bad without knowing about programming (100% agreement there), it's just as important for programmers to know about business (sales cycles, product dev, customer service, etc.)
This hits home for me, struggling to self-learn desktop programming, pushing back expected prototype dates further and further.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it that coders confused the good business guys with the charlatans, or is it that it's difficult to tell them apart? Much like business guys can't tell good coders from bad without knowing about programming (100% agreement there), it's just as important for programmers to know about business (sales cycles, product dev, customer service, etc.)
You have a good point, but still, the difference between learning to "program" and making a working product can be decades. This hits home for me, struggling to self-learn desktop programming, pushing back expected prototype dates further and further.
That said, there is also a spectrum of business difficulty. Running a laundromat is easier than running a startup, but I don't know enough about the business side to quantify that difference.
I view it as a sister to the Dunning Kroger effect. I don't know enough about business to grasp the difficulties in each problem, simply because I don't know what types of difficulties exist in business (at least, not as well as in programming).
I'm one of these guys. Why didn't I learn to program? I had maybe an hour/day in between my job and my side hustle, and I just didn't have enough time to get through the problems in order to be a good programmer. Since then, I've found that watching projects come to life, while learning on the side, has made it much easier to pick up Objective C, Javascript, Ruby, etc. Of course, I didn't expect programmers to work f…
Luckily the base thinking skills transfer over, so learning how to program in Java/C means that the student now knows how to program irregardless of the language. Picking up a new language is less like learning a new dialect and more like learning the local slang and customs. Except for MUMPS. Fuck that shit.
This is a good post. I'd take it one step farther. To say the idea is nothing without the execution still (kind of) suggests that they are different things. I think that where it comes to software, the execution is the idea. I wouldn't quite claim that ideas aren't worth much. I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, p…