The problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs.
Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
So you "just need a hacker", huh?
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Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#22I liked this rant, immature as it might be. Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it. Before I even hear their idea, I do a simple mental calculation. First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition t…
Send them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate. Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#23Is Hacker News the new slashdot or what? How come this entry made it to the top of the page?
And a note for Erik Peterson: some future day when you discover that you need some help for something you don't quite understand fully, you might regret having written that blog entry.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#24It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO. While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need…
traditionally the hackers have been the most undervalued in the whole equation.
Yes they have, probably because hackers are the only ones in the equation who don't need to be good at selling, bullshitting and staking out territory.
Hackers should try and become better at selling themselves and knowing their worth. This, however, is an art - selling yourself well is a very subtle and hard thing to get right. Underdo it and you won't get results. Overdo it and you'll sound like a pretentious asshole.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#25I sure hope he doesn't need as many lines of code to build something as he needs cuss words to make a point.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#26The problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs. Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
There are two main differences:
1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie).
2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#27It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO. While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need…
What's more true is that pairwise, no two of these roles really understand each other.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#28What a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of the company.
If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:
1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital.
2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity.
If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream.
See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere.
As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#29Ah, and a lot of people mention Jobs as a non-hacker, which is simply not true. He was a hacker, but with great businness sense.
"Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14]
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."
Re: So you "just need a hacker", huh?
#30It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO. While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need…
Sure I need a brilliant CEO, brilliant marketing guy, etc, etc. But first I need a great product. I'm going to make that, not the other guys.
You wouldn't start coding something before you'd fleshed out a design, right? So why would you start designing something before you identified the market for it?
Marketing is the social component of design, and you need brilliant marketing before you can create that brilliant product.