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Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

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Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#451

Post by bambax »

valuearb wrote: post #185
bambax wrote: post #39

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. This is oft repeated, but not always true. Take the Nazis (bear with me). The Nazis had the best execution ever . They almost drowned the whole British army, which had previously conquered the world. While fighting battles all over Europe and being one of the most bombarded country in history, they continued to produce tanks, planes, submarines, oper…

Terrible analogy. Nazi execution was horrible post invasion of France. Hitler's conservative generals hadn't foreseen how effective their blitzkrieg tactics were at the beginning of the war. That justified his own delusional view of his own greatness and Nazi superiority, even though he & the Nazi's had nothing to do with the success, it came from german armies brilliant strategies/tactics/training/soldiers and prepa…

Most of these examples are strategic mistakes, not execution. Execution means, the ability to do what you set out to do.

Not focusing on the right objective is not, IMHO, an execution problem. It's a vision problem, a leadership failure.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#452

Post by blurbleblurble »

nitelord wrote: post #448
_wp3r wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would rarely be effective to market yourself as a generalist on paper. If you have 3 primary skill sets you should have 3 focused resumes. If you want a position that requires a generalist, the only/best fit would be founder. In almost all other circumstances, companies hire for a problem and not general optimizations. Even if they need a generalist. I would posit that you have a marketing problem and not a skills…

This is an interesting idea that I'll have to try. I have the 3 primary skillset problem you describe and have a decade of "founder" experience. I thought the breadth of experience and technologies would be impressive, but I think it just confuses most employers. It seems counter-intuitive to intentionally not mention your skills on your resume, and admittedly a little ego-deflating.. but this actually makes sense.

I just thought of something else: it might be a good idea to go around and make a collection of all the different job titles that broad-knowledge people (e.g. "technical artist", "full stack") are given in different industries, and find the ones that fit you. Then study the roles. That way you'll have a language for looking for jobs and will have a better idea of where you might fit in and how to have conversations about it.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#453

Post by spencerflem »

timthelion wrote: post #393
delhanty wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a person with such an idea would be able to present hundreds of pages of alternate designs Arguably, that's much more than just an idea - it's the idea plus the development of the idea, with most of the value being in the development bit.

True, but if I know that you have been working on the idea for 5 years, and that you have those hundreds of pages of alternate designs, then even just the end result may be valuable enough to me that you would want an NDA.

I think the quote is talking about the original idea before work has been put into it, not an end product

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#454

Post by timthelion »

spencerflem wrote: post #453
timthelion wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but if I know that you have been working on the idea for 5 years, and that you have those hundreds of pages of alternate designs, then even just the end result may be valuable enough to me that you would want an NDA.

I think the quote is talking about the original idea before work has been put into it, not an end product

But a sketch isn't an end product. It is not a "realization".

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#455

Post by ThomPete »

"Your idea is not valuable, at all."

If execution is all that matters your idea isn't good enough.

I don't care how many times people keep claiming that execution is all that matters, it's still wrong or it becomes tautological, like saying. The key to success is being successful.

Good ideas are often shitty ideas until they are good. What makes them good isn't just execution but timing, luck and so many other factors.

Failing to understand that is a bigger problem than the few people left who think the idea is everything.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#456

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

0xCMP wrote: post #258
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think industry needs every CS graduate to produce something novel. The work of many is just building upon the work of others.

"novel = of value" in this case. Fill in the blank programs ("Here's the skeleton, make it display a list") and 3 projects with < 200 lines that aren't doing something CS specific are not novel, but all too common and wide spread.

A lot of things of business value go like this, for example: go build this UI in React, etc. You don't need the ability to significantly return something back to academia to do that. You just need good coding mechanics.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#457

Post by cloverich »

toasterlovin wrote: post #51
drewrv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering if people who treat colleges and universities as though their job is worker training are confused, or if I'm naive in believing colleges and universities exist to expand human knowledge through research and education. I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we wa…

Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher education.

For better or worse, it _is_ a proxy for many things. But one that i think is most relevant to a typical job is the ability to see something that is sometimes fun, sometimes boring, and sometimes challenging through to the end. Typically staying put in one place while doing so. Its not intended to be vocational training, but in a sense it matches very well with what's expect of the typical employee: Show up consistently, deal with stress and various people and tasks with an ability to see it all through, without quitting or pissing too many people off. If you can cope well and make it through undergrad, you can likely handle a vast array of jobs.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#458

Post by Joeri »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #415
Joeri wrote: post #410

If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz. So true, and something that stumped me when I sat at the other side of a hiring table myself. I couldn't figure out why until it was pointed out to me that pe…

>By contrast, the people who can't program are on the job market all the time. So, the job market is heavily skewed towards people not good enough to hire. People should be allowed to leave the industry for some amount of time without being marked as damaged goods. In fact, based on how poorly technical interviews have evolved, I have no faith that a hiring manager wouldn't just blindly ignore all candidates with an…

I didn’t mean to imply employment gaps, just that people who can’t program do a lot more job interviews than people who can.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#459

Post by Joeri »

ThomPete wrote: post #455

"Your idea is not valuable, at all." If execution is all that matters your idea isn't good enough. I don't care how many times people keep claiming that execution is all that matters, it's still wrong or it becomes tautological, like saying. The key to success is being successful. Good ideas are often shitty ideas until they are good. What makes them good isn't just execution but timing, luck and so many other factor…

I always understood it to mean that a good idea doesn’t sell unless you execute well on it, and also that an idea doesn’t need to be unique, it just needs to be executed better than the competitors.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#460

Post by greggman »

mikeokner wrote: post #143
md224 wrote: post #104

> Charge more. Charge more still. Go on. This might sound stupid, and maybe it's my inner hippie talking, but did this make anyone else slightly uncomfortable? I get that it's "good business", but something feels kinda gross about saying "extract as much money from other people as you possibly can." Like... shouldn't you just charge whatever you think something (a product, your time) is worth? I realize that "what so…

The problem (other than your inner hippie :P) is that it can be quite difficult to accurately value a software product. Most physical goods are valued based on the cost of materials/manufacturing. However software is an intangible good without those fixed costs. The closest thing is hosting. For B2B solutions, value is more tied to how much it would cost a customer to implement your solution instead of buying yours.…

mini aside but products are never based on the price of materials as if you follow the chain all materials start as free. They are all priced starting at what people are willing to pay for the labor to take/prepare/transport the free materials. maybe that helps see that enginering is no different
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