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You're Overthinking It

engineering.gomiso.com

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Re: You're Overthinking It

#51

Post by Terry_B »

revorad wrote: post #37
Terry_B wrote: post #4

It's a good point but there's a huge field of potential software and opportunity out there that we programmers are not the users of. Who should build it then?

Can you give an example? I really don't get this narrow self-identification of oneself as a programmer. How does being a programmer stop or exclude you from being other things? I'm a programmer, husband, musician, cook, dancer, friend, teacher, comedian, shopper, businessman, writer, house owner, movie-watcher, music fan, son who lives away from his parents, and much more. Programming is a great skill, but not my ide…

Sure, amongst other things I've written software for use by commercial pilots and nurses. I don't think I'll end up being either of those.

Re: You're Overthinking It

#52

Post by BadassFractal »

mgkimsal wrote: post #47
revorad wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet Drew Houston wasn't spending 8-10 hours a day sharing files, neither was Zuck looking up student profiles all day long. I don't agree with the notion that you have to understand the ins and outs of something to start working on it. See http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html Do you think all of Basecamp's customers are software companies because that's the only domain 37s knows deeply about? Funeral directors use Fac…

You end up needing to be willing to commit to learning a hell of a lot about an industry, and that's time you won't be developing. The tech, in most cases, is secondary to understanding the business needs and workflow of an industry. One of the most successful guys I know as a small business software guy took a year to take mortuary classes and work in the funeral industry to learn their needs before developing servi…

I agree with this. If you want to be an entrepreneur, it doesn't matter if you start a construction company, a funeral service or flower delivery. You might not ever write a line of code and still have a perfectly profitable fast growing business.

The prob is that we're all tech geeks here and all we want to do is turn our fetish for coding into the next big thing, so we always try to think in terms of software solutions.

Re: You're Overthinking It

#53

Post by ekianjo »

route66 wrote: post #32
ekianjo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but I think that is why there are more and more people preaching for teaching Everyone to learn coding. Education and support on how to help those users help themselves is how you can help. Anyway, there are far too few programmers to solve all the world's problems, so increasing the number of people being able to program something is a step in the right direction.

You just describe the complete and utter failure of Nerdistan: While the nerds solve their problems by writing software that caters for their nerd-needs (version control, editors, fluffy frameworks just yo name a few) , the rest of the world should just learn to program themselves when they want to solve their problems ... There is a way out of this echo chamber though: don't teach others to program but let them teac…

I know what you mean by "let them teach you about their field", but I think the point of the whole discussion above was that you cannot design a very good product unless you use it yourself. I dont remember who said that in the first place, but I remember such things as "men can't really design stuff for women, because they don't really understand how they think". I am not sure if it applies to everything but there is some truth in that. In software, you can see a similar trend: Facebook is a good social tool because the funder actively uses it all the time. The iPhone is a decent phone because the CEO was going to be an active user. I have heard tons of stories from friends/coworkers where design decisions are taken by non-users, and they usually fail miserably once on the market.

I agree with you that spending a lot of time with others who are not like you is definitely an improvement, but it is still not going to be as good as if they were able to do something on their own.

Re: You're Overthinking It

#54

Post by access_denied »

The problem with the "scratching your own itch" approach to product development is that this gives me exactly 2 possible products: a web browser and online banking. Maybe an ebook reader. Other than that there is no itch. What I am trying to say is, I am a computer kid, I will never have to use the software my dentist or my banker uses. I have no "real" job, I have no "life". I cannot become a lets say a professional circus artist just to build intuition on what might help a professional circus artist softwarewise.

Re: You're Overthinking It

#55

Post by arturoogroo »

itmag wrote: post #42

I think it's also a good thing to stop overthinking it in regard to Hard Work. The schlep barrier and uggh fields come to mind. http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/ What are some ideas that you would do if you weren't concerned about "working smarter" or something having to be elegant from the get-go? My most successful product has been a magazine (and let me define that success:…

Hi, what kind of magazine, is it an app magazine? Me and a friend of mine are making something similar, but for shopping in the android platform... Love to hear what you're doing!
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