Remember "idea-men"? "Listen I have this great idea for a web app, it's going to be like the Facebook for hardware stores [or whatever] and people can rate/vot

Remember "idea-men"? "Listen I have this great idea for a web app, it's going to be like the Facebook for hardware stores [or whatever] and people can rate/vote/tag ... I got the whole idea worked out, I just need someone to program it for me" etc. Every programmer has heard these kinds of proposals many times. One (of many) problems with this kind of proposal is that the idea-man, unable to program (and not wanting to learn) has no idea about the complexity of what they're asking. And even if they think they have the whole idea worked out, not being able to program means they probably missed a lot of shortcuts, possibilities and best practices. The worst ones hand-wave this with the possibility of a fresh outsider-look on things! Except that the whole (fully worked-out) idea probably needs to be reworked entirely before it's even feasible or competitive. The programmer would probably have been better off without the idea, cause that's where it started to go wrong. Similarly, if you believe math isn't worth your time but instead want to hire ML experts to implement your ML-related ideas (formulated in terms of "expected business outcome"), puts you in a very similar role. (Tongue-in-cheek) I got a really great idea, the expected business outcome is: make lots of profit. It's fool-proof. I checked with some of my people and they agreed, making profit is a solid idea. I just need some business dude to implement for me. I'm not really sure what sort of business person, my time can be spent better than learning about subtleties between sorts of business people. I just need to hire a good one. But remember, the idea was mine first.