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I see a lot of "just learn to program" around here, and I think it's all a bit glib and far from reality. Firstly, programming is hard. It's not the sort of th
by sgentle 16y ago
I see a lot of "just learn to program" around here, and I think it's all a bit glib and far from reality.
Firstly, programming is hard. It's not the sort of thing you pick up in a few weeks. Hell, there are people who manage to make it through a CS degree and several years in industry without actually knowing what they're doing. What makes you think it's a valuable use of your time to do something mediocre that other people have spent much of their lives learning to do well?
Secondly, good programming doesn't make a good business. It's as important (I would even say more important) to have a solid revenue model. Who are your customers? Why are they buying? How can you get more? These are questions many programmers wouldn't want to touch with a barge pole. Don't waste that symbiosis.
To me, the real message is that ideas aren't worth shit. Implementation is king. It seems like a lot of people (angry ex-startup programmers?) confuse real business people (who can contribute a lot to a team in sales & biz dev) with useless "ideas guys". If you're one of those then, y'know, stop it. You should go learn an actual skill (programming or otherwise) that will allow you to contribute to the idea's realisation.
(I should clarify, though, that I think anyone working in software should learn about programming. But encouraging business guys to write their own code is like encouraging programmers to draw their own art.)
- Travis 16y agoIs it that coders confused the good business guys with the charlatans, or is it that it's difficult to tell them apart? Much like business guys can't tell good coders from bad without knowing about programming (100% agreement there), it's just as important for programmers to know about business (sales cycles, product dev, customer service, etc.)
- r0s 16y agoYou have a good point, but still, the difference between learning to "program" and making a working product can be decades. This hits home for me, struggling to self-learn desktop programming, pushing back expected prototype dates further and further.
- Travis 16y agoI expect that programming for the desktop is more difficult than web stuff. I do web stuff only, but still have the perspective to kind of realize the spectrum of difficulty generally inherent to different types of programming. That said, there is also a spectrum of business difficulty. Running a laundromat is easier than running a startup, but I don't know enough about the business side to quantify that difference. I view it as a sister to the Dunning Kroger effect. I don't know enough about business to grasp the difficulties in each problem, simply because I don't know what types of difficulties exist in business (at least, not as well as in programming).
- krschultz 16y agoI don't think they need to learn how to program well enough to make the idea they had, but they should learn something about the process of software development. Even if that just means reading a couple books on managing softward development (almost anyone asking this question hasn't even spent 8 hours 1 day reading blogs like coding horror or joel on software). Understanding some of the challenges in writing software, being able to succesfully communicate with their software developers, understanding that "build me twitter for pets" is not a spec etc. I had someone come to me the other day and they thought they had a brilliant idea, if only I could put it together (but it would probably be easy). He described Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to me. I told him it already existed. He was deflated. Since he couldn't even understand what he was talking about, he wasn't really even able to do competitive analysis and didn't know these things existed.