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Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that should certainly be s

by phlux 15y ago

Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that should certainly be shared out... I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly. Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall: The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X. he then turns and build the application to do X himself. This in and of itself is fine -- but it will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely. The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit. I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way this article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind) This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.

jeromec 15y ago
phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way. > why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing work That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best. Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are busy building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are many amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off. Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?
- phlux 15y ago
  Ok, I think I need to clarify what I believe an "idea" to be. So, this is both to you and Random42... To Random42's point, simply having an idea like: "Wouldn't it be cool if cars could fly" is obviously worthless. I think that I was not clear enough: I think of an idea as a vetted plan. An idea, based on an understanding of a problem and a market, a vision on how it will make money. A design a spec and even mock-ups. Far more than a simple statement of wishful thinking. For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed. For example, I have a current "idea" in the medical space (which is where my current full time focus is) that is a patient entertainment system. This idea is based on several years of full time health care systems design experience designing two hospitals each with a budget of more than $500 million. It is an iterative evolution of a previous idea which we implemented and built and released open source, and a solid understanding of the market, the challenges and the sales cycle. Further, it is arrived at with the inclusion of hospital IT and Clinical staff that I have worked with on two projects -- and input from the founder of one of the existing market leading companies in this space. I have a product spec, financial model, business plan and mock-ups. This is my "idea" -- it is not worthless because it is a proven, fully informed documented product plan. I still need development and a host of other things to accomplish this. I have millions of simple wishful thinking ideas as well, but for anything that has value - real potential I go through the above. I apparently was not clear with what I thought an idea was... I hope this makes my perspective a little more clear.
  - jeromec 15y ago
    > For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed. But that's the problem. You know why? Because anybody can do this. You can have one million people do this, for one million years, and you know what you'd end up with? Nothing. Don't get me wrong, it's great that you also attach careful research to your idea, but that only serves to lessen the risk you've overlooked obvious reasons for it to fail. It doesn't mean it won't fail. If your idea was guaranteed to succeed then crossing over into development wouldn't be a problem. You'd be able to get the money somehow. I know many ordinary people who have set aside as much as $50-100K just by being focused. Or you could get investment, or a SBA backed bank loan. But idea people won't actually work to do these things, because they know the truth: their idea may end up failing (being worthless when actually tried). Either that or the other truth: even once an idea is developed it takes time and effort to grow it into a success.
random42 15y ago
You are thinking in the line of, A * Idea + B * Execution == N Units of success/value. Most of the people here believe, C * Idea * Execution == N units of success/value. Ideas all alone ARE worthless. Only when coupled with decent execution, they generate some success/value. They are more of a multiplier factor, than having a worth of itself. Let me give you some (admittedly) extravagant example of ideas (They are not my original ideas). 1. cars that can fly, just based on solar energy. 2. A machine, that lets you travel through time. 3. A medicine, that makes you live forever/ you dont grow old. Do you believe, should I (Or the person who had these original ideas/fantasy) call for the share of money, when these ideas are implemented?
jpr 15y ago
> will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely If someone else implementing a vaguely similar idea makes those people pissed off, well, it's certainly not the implementors fault. I've had a zillion ideas only to find out that someone has already executed them. At first it somewhat pissed me off, like isn't there anything that hasn't been already done? Then I got over it and realized that you need a crapload of hard work, persuasion and elbow grease to make the ideas a product that people want to use badly enough that they pay you for it.

by phlux 15y ago

jeromec 15y ago

phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way. > why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing work That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best. Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are busy building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are many amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off. Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?

phlux 15y ago
Ok, I think I need to clarify what I believe an "idea" to be. So, this is both to you and Random42... To Random42's point, simply having an idea like: "Wouldn't it be cool if cars could fly" is obviously worthless. I think that I was not clear enough: I think of an idea as a vetted plan. An idea, based on an understanding of a problem and a market, a vision on how it will make money. A design a spec and even mock-ups. Far more than a simple statement of wishful thinking. For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed. For example, I have a current "idea" in the medical space (which is where my current full time focus is) that is a patient entertainment system. This idea is based on several years of full time health care systems design experience designing two hospitals each with a budget of more than $500 million. It is an iterative evolution of a previous idea which we implemented and built and released open source, and a solid understanding of the market, the challenges and the sales cycle. Further, it is arrived at with the inclusion of hospital IT and Clinical staff that I have worked with on two projects -- and input from the founder of one of the existing market leading companies in this space. I have a product spec, financial model, business plan and mock-ups. This is my "idea" -- it is not worthless because it is a proven, fully informed documented product plan. I still need development and a host of other things to accomplish this. I have millions of simple wishful thinking ideas as well, but for anything that has value - real potential I go through the above. I apparently was not clear with what I thought an idea was... I hope this makes my perspective a little more clear.
- jeromec 15y ago
  > For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed. But that's the problem. You know why? Because anybody can do this. You can have one million people do this, for one million years, and you know what you'd end up with? Nothing. Don't get me wrong, it's great that you also attach careful research to your idea, but that only serves to lessen the risk you've overlooked obvious reasons for it to fail. It doesn't mean it won't fail. If your idea was guaranteed to succeed then crossing over into development wouldn't be a problem. You'd be able to get the money somehow. I know many ordinary people who have set aside as much as $50-100K just by being focused. Or you could get investment, or a SBA backed bank loan. But idea people won't actually work to do these things, because they know the truth: their idea may end up failing (being worthless when actually tried). Either that or the other truth: even once an idea is developed it takes time and effort to grow it into a success.

random42 15y ago

You are thinking in the line of, A * Idea + B * Execution == N Units of success/value. Most of the people here believe, C * Idea * Execution == N units of success/value. Ideas all alone ARE worthless. Only when coupled with decent execution, they generate some success/value. They are more of a multiplier factor, than having a worth of itself. Let me give you some (admittedly) extravagant example of ideas (They are not my original ideas). 1. cars that can fly, just based on solar energy. 2. A machine, that lets you travel through time. 3. A medicine, that makes you live forever/ you dont grow old. Do you believe, should I (Or the person who had these original ideas/fantasy) call for the share of money, when these ideas are implemented?

jpr 15y ago

> will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely If someone else implementing a vaguely similar idea makes those people pissed off, well, it's certainly not the implementors fault. I've had a zillion ideas only to find out that someone has already executed them. At first it somewhat pissed me off, like isn't there anything that hasn't been already done? Then I got over it and realized that you need a crapload of hard work, persuasion and elbow grease to make the ideas a product that people want to use badly enough that they pay you for it.