Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

startupweekend.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#21

Post by saurik »

enjo wrote: post #16
thesash wrote: post #15

Add the mythical man month to the list. SO many non-technical folks fall victim to the idea that by putting more people on a job you can get it done faster, when in reality as we all know, efficiency drops sharply after a point. It takes a woman 9 months to carry a pregnancy, 9 women can't do same the job in one month, and the same is true for solving any complex problem.

Except sometimes you CAN throw manpower at a problem and solve it more quickly. All projects are not the same, and all problems are not the same. It largely depends on how parallelizable the work is and how competent the overall system architecture is. Point being: lets not turn platitudes into rules:)

"when in reality as we all know, efficiency drops sharply after a point" Exactly where the "point" at which efficiency drops sharply is certainly project-dependent, but thesash didn't claim that it was not: only that people make the mistake of not realizing that this is even a problem worth understanding and taking into consideration, much less a fundamental one that will likely affect their project.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#22

Post by mtrimpe »

maximz wrote: post #18
d_p wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, he went away. I still have the response saved on my desktop if anybody is curious about the context.

what was it?

Let it be. If he/she chose to remove it that's their choice and deserves to be respected.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#24

Post by d_p »

iamdann wrote: post #13
d_p wrote: post #2

Hey all. This is my first post to HN and also my first contribution to the Startup Weekend blog as an employee. I think the subject matter would be interesting here and would love to hear if there is anything you think I missed. Startup Weekend gets to be in a cool place to lead among tech entrepreneurs and I'm always to happy to advocate for those in our field. Thanks for reading :)

I'll be at the Startup Weekend event in NYC tonight/this weekend. First time with this hackathon, excited to see how it goes.

How exciting! Are you going to pitch an idea?

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#25

Post by thesash »

saurik wrote: post #21
enjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except sometimes you CAN throw manpower at a problem and solve it more quickly. All projects are not the same, and all problems are not the same. It largely depends on how parallelizable the work is and how competent the overall system architecture is. Point being: lets not turn platitudes into rules:)

"when in reality as we all know, efficiency drops sharply after a point" Exactly where the "point" at which efficiency drops sharply is certainly project-dependent, but thesash didn't claim that it was not: only that people make the mistake of not realizing that this is even a problem worth understanding and taking into consideration, much less a fundamental one that will likely affect their project.

Exactly, 2x people != 2x productivity, it simply doesn't work that way.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#26

Post by trey851 »

As someone that is interested in possibly working with developers in the future but does not have a programming background. Can you elaborate on number 7. Would practicing on something like Codecademy help with this or are there better ways to improve your technical knowledge.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#27

Post by d_p »

trey851 wrote: post #26

As someone that is interested in possibly working with developers in the future but does not have a programming background. Can you elaborate on number 7. Would practicing on something like Codecademy help with this or are there better ways to improve your technical knowledge.

Great question, and I would invite any other developers in here to reply as well.

Where to start...having open conversations with your developers is a great place to start. It turns out we love studying and talking about our field.

If you don't have ready access to developers, you can try reading through "Coders at Work" that I linked to at the bottom of my post. Another great idea is to just go to Wikipedia with any of the terms you don't know.

Codecademy or things like it might teach you a little more about a specific language, but these are general principles that are not dependent on a given programming language. This is more about software engineering as a discipline.

You might also try "The Agile Samurai" by Jonathan Rasmusson. I've never personally read it, but it's in our office and I didn't hate what I saw in the table of contents.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#29

Post by iamdann »

d_p wrote: post #24
iamdann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be at the Startup Weekend event in NYC tonight/this weekend. First time with this hackathon, excited to see how it goes.

How exciting! Are you going to pitch an idea?

We'll see. I've got a few ideas, but more than open to joining better ones.

Re: Things I, As a Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew

#30

Post by enjo »

thesash wrote: post #19
enjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except sometimes you CAN throw manpower at a problem and solve it more quickly. All projects are not the same, and all problems are not the same. It largely depends on how parallelizable the work is and how competent the overall system architecture is. Point being: lets not turn platitudes into rules:)

My point isn't about throwing manpower at a problem, it's about diminishing returns. The notion that if you put two people on a problem they will be able to solve it twice as fast is a logical fallacy. That's a fact, not a platitude. That being said, if you put 100 people on the problem, you may be able to solve it quickly, but even then you will eventually reach a point where adding more people does not add any more…

If you put two people on the exact same problem, sure. But, software systems are made up of LOTS of problems, a large amount of which can be solved in parallel.

That's why it's a platitude. It gets bantered about by developers as an explanation about why we just can't go any faster (hiring people is a lot of work after all), but in reality they CAN go faster with more people working on the various problems that make up the system.

Of course there is a point of diminishing return. The management costs come into play. The communication inefficiencies. The process issues. Those can be largely solved with good leadership, however.

It's a rule that is only true when it's true, which doesn't make it that useful to me. I've grown teams on multiple occasions from one or two developers to much larger numbers. While productivity may not have increased linearly, it sure made the projects go much faster. Hell I'd argue that doubling a two person team more than doubled productivity just because the external drags tends to be more distributed which reduces the context switching developers are having to do.

I think there are many more shades of grey that inexperienced founders just don't recognize when they're bound to that idea.

Post reply on HN