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Why “Idea” People Are Risky and What to Do About It

99 points by cjwinans79 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago
There is no such thing as an "idea" person who is valuable because of their ideas. If they appear valuable, it's because they also have actual experience with execution, or more frequently, they have money or connections (which I don't say to necessarily denigrate, this kind of person can be very useful as well.)
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  Easy to get snowed though if you don't know what to watch out for. That was my motivation for writing this. I've been kicked a couple times by (good intentioned) people that did not realize their success (ideas) had been team efforts.
21eleven 5y ago
An idea is a base quantity. A bad idea maybe worth 1, a good idea 10, a great idea 100. But execution is a multiplier. Good execution is a 10x. Great execution is a 100x. An average idea with excellent execution is worth a lot more than a great idea with poor execution.
- _dps 5y ago
  This model circulates a lot but I haven't understood why; it literally treats them as the same thing. The model is outcome = idea x execution So both are "multipliers" in the language of the model. The formula is completely symmetric in the two quantities.
  - thunkshift1 5y ago
    My two cents: a good idea is 1, A great idea is also 1. It doesn’t mean jack till its usable. So it would be more like - Good idea (1) x good execution(10) = 10 Great idea (1) x great execution (100) = 100 Ex: my great idea is that faster-than-light travel will REVOLUTIONIZE HUMANITY! Of course I’m an idea guy, so I cant be bothered with physics and engineering and special relativity and all that riff-raff. Let a specialized team figure that out. But hear me out - this is a BRILLIANT IDEA when finished. (That’ll be 100M seed funding, thank you very much.)
  - kthejoker2 5y ago
    Maybe it's more (idea+1.000001)^execution - 1? * Without execution, an idea is worth 0. * Even without an idea, execution has value - go schedule a 45 minute meeting with a smart person with no set topic and something will happen. * Execution is infinitely more effective than ideas at producing value.
ajb 5y ago
This article has a limited perspective. People have different skill sets, and valorizing one skill set and demonising another is something that is not very helpful. You as an engineer may want to say that your skill set is the most crucial one and others are worth less, but you know what? Other people are going to do the same to you, and often with more success. For example, UX and design is now quite valued, and frequently you hear UX and design guys disparage engineering. Is that something we want to encourage? It's better to encourage making rational decisions about what skill set you need and who is best to supply them, so we are all judged on our merits and not based on self-marketting. Idea-generation is useful in a lot of contexts. Personally my best ideas have often been to figure out a way where we didn't need to execute a bunch of difficult stuff that the execution types were about to take on.
Anointmous 5y ago
It never fails to amaze me how many non technical people - run of the mill (fill-in-a-word) people are on "hacker"news. The person who said that he was an idea person who executes ideas all the time that it was stigmatized by morons is right. In programming in particular, coming up with "ideas" and executing them immediately in your programming is pretty much a constant. And it's arguably what hacker, a real hacker, means by definition of word. My experience is people who don't appreciate ideas are the first to plagiarize them, steal, or cover it up. In fact, its arguably what a lot of current big companies that are stagnating the country are running on. Advice - make sure you have no people in the company you make that think that way. Make it part of the interview - give them an opportunity to say the acceptably stigmatizing thing, and then eliminate them.
vinay_ys 5y ago
I think the ideas vs execution is a false dichotomy. In fast growing startups, there are people who can hack they way out of most problems quickly. Such people are immensely useful during the exploratory phase and early growth phase. If the startup continue on their growth trajectory into next hyper growth phase, they need deep systems thinkers to build better end to end systems that can deal with the inevitable product complexity, org growth and user growth. They obviously cannot build complex systems all by themselves. They need that team of hackers to believe in and execute their systems vision. They are usually good at selling their vision to the hackers as well as to the org leadership. In really successful startups that become unicorns and beyond, there are also great visionary org leaders who can curate and evolve harmonious and motivated teams that execute well to keep pace with the growth of the company. Of course, while in middle of it all, it feels very chaotic and out of control.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  This reminds me of the classic "Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners": https://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-town-planners.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-t... Related: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
  - Animats 5y ago
    This is a classic problem with successful startups. At some point, there's pressure to bring in "adult supervision", which usually means a CEO from a big company. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it makes things much worse. Microsoft and Amazon stayed with the founders for a long time. Apple famously went for an outside CEO, got into trouble, and went back to the founders. Google/Alphabet is back with the founders in charge.
    - k__ 5y ago
      I think, becoming or finding a humble "adult" CEO isn't easy. I worked with brilliant founders, who were really bad managers. It almost seemed like their high skills in engineering came from letting every other part of their personality deteriorate.
b93rn 5y ago
Idea people are most of the time really creative. Creative people are most of the time more chaotic. This article is all about a well balanced team composition in the end. A team full of code robots does not work and a team full of 'idea people' does also not work.
evolve2k 5y ago
I’m an ideas guy and it’s been very frustrating to have to raise to ascend the stigma. I iterate solutions much faster than most. Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding. I know what people are talking about with the “all talk no action” person. That’s not me, some of us really are excellent at iterating good ideas. It’s a discarded skill, but highly valuable once I’m on most teams, I can just never promote this strength due to the stigma.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right, but I think the real key is emphasizing what has been done already and what the immediate next steps are— that puts the accountability out there and keeps the conversation grounded in reality. I think another litmus test for idea-executor vs pure executor is your willingness to do throw-away work. A pure executor reads the design doc, says "sure", and just builds it— an idea-executor recognizes that the long-term maintenance of the system will almost certainly dwarf the initial cost of coding it up, and is willing to extend the discovery phase with partially-functional prototypes and so-on in order to really get a firm handle on whether the thing is going to go where they want it to go. (Recent example— building up chunks of a moderately complicated build setup in parallel in Jenkins Pipeline and GitLab CI in order to understand how the two solutions would compare on maintainability, end user ergonomics, permissions hassles, flexibility, how much documentation we would need to support it, etc etc.)
- ackbar03 5y ago
  Maybe your not following through enough? I feel like if your one to always iterate on ideas and follow through and do a good job, you'll be more of a bad ass, I doubt there would be any stigma
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    generating an idea or a solution is of course easier than following through, if you generate solutions and ideas quicker than most people it means you will have lots of ideas and solutions, you then need to develop the skill of only saying the best ideas otherwise with all the ideas you will be too enervating (and some times you will fail at this task) furthermore there are some careers that mean you will not develop a reputation for follow through before you develop a reputation for ideas, for example if you are a consultant and brought into a place you will say a lot of ideas before you have the chance to follow through. In these situations you will be seen as all talk no action because you start off with lots of talk and nobody has experienced your actions. I'm sure similar scenarios can spring to mind.
santiagobasulto 5y ago
This describes me perfectly. And the struggle to be better at execution is huge. But with a lot of dedication and habit building I've been able to (partially) overcome it.
- slx26 5y ago
  Echoing the other comment that was talking about stigma... I think we should at least admit that, of course, without execution ideas aren't worth much, but without ideas you don't even have anything to do. And in fact, most of the people that are not good at "ideas", are not good at executing either. That is, making good plans to create things. Of course, executing as "following orders" is another entirely different category that many more people can fulfill adequately. So, we should look at ourselves to make sure we are not only daydreamers, that ideas don't only work in our heads, that they might actually make sense in the real world too... But creativity is not the same skill as planning, and that's kinda ok too. It's good to keep your feet on the ground to avoid selling dreams, and I also really hate the people that will only talk big and then show no interest on working on some of their "best" ideas, but creativity is not the same as the ability to fully realize ideas, from creative inception to success. This later part requires many skills. Having reasonable and interesting ideas is only one of them.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  Funny, it describes the opposite of me. When the high-level idea people start talking, I have already phased out. It seems somewhat useless to me, they spend so many hours talking about possibilities that shatter at the first contact with the real world. Without at least a bit of practical time to attempt things and fail, I am basically useless at design.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    People are good at different things, this is a feature, not a bug. Some people are more explorers, others executors. Probably are lots of other words to fit in there with slightly different meanings. There is some (too much) pressure for everybody to be great at everything and when they are different enough are labeled as having a disease. This is why people work together, to build on each other’s strengths.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
"The armchair quarterback. They love to wax poetic about what could be done yet when asked to get the ball rolling, they show no interest. The act of calling out gaps and offering solutions is their sweet spot." Is this saying that 'calling out gaps and offering solutions' is awesome as long as they help implement the solutions? Asking because for every person I knew who espouses ideas and won't help (too few to recall any) there are scores upon scores upon scores of people who compulsively resist fixes - no matter how many resources are provided for.
waynesonfire 5y ago
>2. Insistence on needing a “team” to implement the idea yet in the paragraph author states, > As it turns out, they’ve spent their career at a big company and didn’t fully realize that much of their success was actually a team effort. Insisting that an idea needs a team means that the person DOES realize that their success was a team effort. Glaring inconsistency, I stopped reading here.
- jl2718 5y ago
  I have noticed that the only productive unit of execution from idea to functional proof of the idea, is exactly one person. It helps tremendously if they have others to talk to about their idea, ‘idea people’, if you will. But it doesn’t work to have a separation between authority over ideas and responsibility for execution. I assume that is what prototypical ‘idea person’ is looking for in a team.
  - dagw 5y ago
    Having worked with 'idea people' at various companies of various sizes, I've found that what the best 'ideas people' bring to the table is the ability to sell that idea up the food chain to get resources and time for the 'execution people' to actually be able to execute.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  It's possible that they recognize that a team is necessary for execution (and if they don't realize this nothing gets done) but still think of the product as stemming wholly from them.
- fotta 5y ago
  Yeah this part really rubbed me the wrong way. Don't buy into an ideas person without committing to providing the proper support. Otherwise that person will get burnt out.
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  I was pulling from experience. In that instance, you are correct, they did realize it was a team effort. But what I failed to share will hopefully clear up the confusion. They didn't call that out during the hiring process. They talked themselves up as if they could succeed single-handedly. It wasn't shared until they were failing to show progress and then it became an excuse. It wasn't possible to give (or hire) them a team. In the end, the person was let go to find a bigger company with the resources and capacity they would need to succeed. No hard feelings... just not a fit. Does that clear everything up?
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I'm an "execution" guy. I make things happen. Been doing it my entire adult life. It's incredibly valuable, and "idea people" know it. But they won't say it. If I had a dime for every "idea person" that wanted me to realize their harebrained AI-powered cheese straightener, for nothing, and they get all the money and credit, because it's "their idea," I'd be rich. Yeah, I'm cynical.
- ascales 5y ago
  I feel like this article kinda confuses "idea people" and "people with an idea." Idea people should know how to prove an idea. I've had a lot of similar hairbrained ideas come my way looking to build an MVP for something, and typically the end of our conversation is "use an excel spreadsheet and prototype this idea and come back in 6 months, then I'll charge you $75-$200k to build the tech" I've prototyped enough of my own ideas to know that most ideas are shit.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I think a lot of ideas are good, but they need to be "walked through," and refined. They are generally great at the hand-wavy level, but the devil is always in the details. I believe that a lot of these colossal startup failures are great ideas; poorly executed. The people I'm working with now, had a great idea, but didn't have it "thought through." I said "I'll realize it, but expect big changes. I'll be developing a running prototype, and we'll be tossing out things that looked good on paper, but fall flat, in execution." That's exactly what has happened. It takes a lot of patience; on both the "idea person" level, and the "execution person" level. I need to take their ideas seriously, and they need to shut up and pay attention when I catalog the costs of their ideas in the real world. It'll work out, and won't look at all like they thought, but I'm designing an excellent baseline for creativity. It will work very well, will be localizable, accessible, and will allow creatives to put a lot of chrome on things.
    - joshspankit 5y ago
      I think you’re both right, but it’s the definition of “an idea” that has some assumptions. Take Noah Kagan’s term “wantrepreneur” as the groundwork for what I mean: Person A’s ideas are: Get business cards, build a website, get pamphlets, buy equipment, buy a business car, and so-on. Person B’s idea is: find 3 clients first, do the rest after. Person A’s ideas are all objectively good, but many of us who have seen businesses come and go won’t count those as ideas, and therefore will say “you have a good idea that needs refining” when talking about the core idea for the business.
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Not every “idea person” is a good fit for your small business. In fact, most will be a terrible fit. How can you tell? TFA goes on to list three characteristics of people who are dud team members, and 5 characteristics of good team members, but it doesn't do what it claimed it will - tell you how to identify such a person at the hiring stage. TFA is an example of what it warns against.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  Well, just don't hire an "idea person", especially not if your company is not gigantic. If you are running a startup, at least one of the founders is "idea person". You don't need another one, especially not as an employee. It just doesn't bring any value to the business. Hire "execution person" to bring existing ideas further. An if "execution person" is not good, it will show, if not during the hiring phase, then soon later.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    How do you distinguish between candidates at the hiring stage? > if not during the hiring phase, then soon later. How soon? A week? A month? A year? Effective interviewing strategies are valuable to organisations because the trial and error approach to recruitment is so costly and disruptive.
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      My comment was that you don’t need to worry about hiring wrong idea person because you should not hire them at all. As for execution person objective criteria exists, and it’s possible to evaluate performance, either at the hiring stage or soon afterwards. Evaluating idea person objectively in a short period of time is way harder.
      - wombatmobile 5y ago
        If people came with a label that says "Idea Person" or "Execution Person" we could just read their label and do like you say. But what do we do when candidates claim to be both, and there is no label?
ademup 5y ago
Another potential red flag attribute I've witnessed is shifting of the idea deliverablee\objectives after the green light is given. A partner I once had developed a pretty great idea we decided to execute on after 20+ hours of planning. He started proposing entirely new (follow-up) ideas mere hours into our execution. Then started morphing the original plan. 1 week later he was dropping idea bombs left and right. I finally delivered something close to the original plan and he spent the next 2 months slowly backing out of the project entirely, having put in less than 10% of the effort.
- rvanlaar 5y ago
  That's a recurring experience. Sorry you got bitten by it. I've had it as well and others I know as well. This is normal for what is here given as 'idea' persons. It used to generate a lot of frustrations within me. Now I know that an idea person, or for that matter most entrepreneurs, will have ideas. They'll share their current version with much enthusiasm and will wake up energized the next morning with, for them, tiny iterations on that idea. For others, such as the engineer implementing it, those 'tiny iterations', are completely new and will require large amounts of rework. One of my colleagues described it as the idea person being a little boat that is swarming around a large container ship. The container ship just isn't able to change course on the whims of the little boat.
whatshisface 5y ago
You can only be useful as an ideas guy if you're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. Everyone knows that, and that's why calling yourself and "ideas person" is received in exactly the same way that calling yourself the smartest person in the room is received: with some eye-rolling.
jungturk 5y ago
The "how to start" point resonates with my experience. There's a cohort of "idea" people who are efficient at anticipating and clearing obstacles (including those that occur at inception around "how to start") without actually being all that great at executing those adjustments. I think we value that type of contribution (often allocating it to leaders, though every contributor does it to some extent) even though it might not materialize as "doing" anything.
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  Yep. In a small, scrappy business, people that can kickstart an effort are highly coveted. When you couple that with great ideation... priceless.
mkl95 5y ago
Daydreaming in software development is imo not a disease but a symptom, and it's a form of escapism. Broken processes, extreme technical debt, tight project constraints, very limited resources, etc. all can lead to engineers wanting a way out.
thibran 5y ago
> While ideas get most of the fanfare, they don’t really matter unless steps are taken to make them work in your business. Stopped reading here. It's not about ideas, it's about having an understanding what could be done. If thinking is grounded in reality and your resource constrains, ideas are worth a lot. Otherwise all your company would do is copy other companies.
circlefavshape 5y ago
Just wanted to add - the worst "ideas person" I ever knew delivered an endless stream of really obvious ideas. An ideas person who delivers good ideas that no-one else has thought of can be useful, independent of their implementation skills
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  Agreed. There is some room for someone that can provide great ideas, however, small businesses need to (at least) pair them with someone capable of executing. This is more "exception" than rule though.
lordnacho 5y ago
The problem with people who think of ideas and don't try to execute them is that they can't incorporate feedback. At best you get a second-hand explanation of why the magic thing can't be built. You also end up with an attribution problem: it's easy to say what the big idea is, but it takes a lot of work to make it happen. Why give credit to the guy with the big picture, when the big picture is probably something the guy who implements it had as well? Devil is in the details. You also don't get good ideas if you don't try to implement them. The implementation process is a creative process, which btw your ideas guy might not recognize, leading to issues. I've had ideas guys where I worked before, and it was toxic. My view is basically that ideas guys are a kind of leech: they take credit for positive things that are obvious, they come up with excuses for things that are negative (team failed me boohoo), and they don't generate better ideas than people who are doing the implementation. My experience is in quant trading, where you have people who can code, and sometimes people who just fluff about strategies. With the randomness and noise it's easy to be fooled by ideas guys, and it's taken me a long time to just dismiss the concept entirely. I actually just got off an interview where we discussed this problem in the space, and we agreed it's absolutely essential that people can code, otherwise their trading ideas are worthless.
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  > Devil is in the details. That's why I was quick to call out that ideas have little true value without execution. Ideas are born and die every day. We're naturally creative but we also (generally speaking) don't tend to follow-through. That's the real and hard part.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
Execution takes grit; people skills (if you need to create buy-in); and really some level of belief in the outcome. I had to change the development process and cycle of my team, and even with instant buy-in it was tough.
artembugara 5y ago
> They were great at leading, not doing. Wow, since when "leading" isn't the most difficult/well-paid job in our society? Overall, I think the author is mixing up apples with oranges and that's why this article sounds so weird. It's a very contradicting piece right here.
- cjwinans79 5y ago
  How so? I wrote from my gut here and am not one to think I have all the answers (far from it). I wasn't attempting to dismiss leadership in any way, shape, or form. Merely calling out the difference between personally "doing" (in the sense of small business) versus the "orchestrating" that is more typical in a larger company. I've worked in both and have seen how people that spent their career in a large company may struggle in a small business setting. No shame. Just a (often overlooked) distinction.
jollybean 5y ago
You need 'ideation' at every stage of the game, in every part of the business. The 'skill' is to distill the ideas into an operational basis. Both ops and new thinking are important.
goldenManatee 5y ago
Given the list of what makes an execution person, would be a dumb mistake for someone like that to work for someone else. If you can do it all yourself, others would just slowly you down, seemingly.
TrevorJ 5y ago
This just sounds like bad understanding of how to hire the right people for the needs of your business. If a coach fields a football team that's made up exclusively of quarterbacks, who's fault is that? A team that can execute flawlessly, but has no vision and no solid ideas is not useful. A team that can come up with a million 'good' ideas, but has no ability to execute is just as bad. Ultimately, your org needs to be built of the right balance of both sets of skills.
deleted 5y ago
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jhinra 5y ago
I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back: > I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot. Link to full post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_an_idea_guy_to_manage_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_...
sobakistodor 5y ago
I've been generating tons of ideas my entire life. This is why I KNOW how cheap the ideas is and, also, how hard it is to implement something and make is usable/working/needed/cheap... And this is why I work as software developer (execution person), not manager\idea-generator. I must keep myself in ABILITY to implement things - this is what i don't have for free, unlike the ability of generating ideas: every day I have 5 new genious ideas of some city garbage collection automation with bidrs or a new neural-network GPS-replacement-by-photo thing. When I hear somene's good idea i STEAL it with no regret/sorry and with clear conscience. When person tell me its really GOOD idea, i just trying to implement it before he found a way to do this (this never happend with idea-people) and I dont give a shit who generated this idea, dont giving any credits to original person intentionally to punish idea-people for not goind anything. Also, knowing my ability to generate tons of ideas I feel no shame to steal another's ideas, because it cost nothing for me: I could generate this idea myself another day easily with the same genius quality. So, idea people, give me you ideas and go to hell. Tomorrow I talk to another idea-person and forget you. Ideas is like air: today i inhale the air who was exhaled by someone else and this is not called stealing. So, you must implement idea to proof its existance. Tell me that I stole your idea looking at my project - i dont care. Your blabla does not change whom MY working project belongs to, sorry, haha.
mattkevan 5y ago
Dreadful article. It’s not hiring the ‘ideas person’ that’s the problem, the problem is not understanding people’s strengths and weaknesses and failing to build a balanced team. Some people are better at coming up with ideas, others are better at executing. Doesn’t mean one is better than the other, they just have different things to offer. A team full of people who ‘get things done’ is just as bad as a team full of ideas people. Belbin states that there actually nine roles needed for effective teams. Most people are strong in a few areas, but it’s almost impossible to be strong in all of them. This article seems like it’s written by a Belbin ‘Shaper’ unable to see value in other people’s skills and viewpoints. https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles
trunnell 5y ago
“Someone that rose through the ranks” IME, being able to actually do the work involved is the single best filter to reduce the risk of “idea people.” People with “great ideas” who also previously did similar work themselves can be hugely valuable. People with “great ideas” who lack first-hand knowledge of the tasks involved are usually not worth following. Usually. The product management role comes to mind as one where we see this rule playing out far too often. However, when I was at Netflix I saw a handful of notable exceptions. One of the Product Managers for recommendation algorithms was an expert at math but not engineering. That person had excellent ideas and was incredibly effective even though they needed a team to build their ideas. Another Product Manager I worked with also lacked an engineering background but was nonetheless very effective as a partner in projects we did together when I was an engineering manager. (In general, I think Netflix has some of the best PMs around.) Elsewhere, I’ve seen PMs routinely fail by promoting infeasible schedules, overreaching into the engineering agendas, or discounting engineers’ ideas—- the type of mistakes that are easy to make when someone lacks first-hand development experience. The PMs who were the exceptions to the rule made up for their lack of first-hand engineering knowledge by years of experience “embedded” into software teams where they could build their sensitivity to engineering issues, which later allowed them to easily defer to engineers and eng. managers when those issues arose. They were also eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and get into the details with you to understand problems. Infinite curiosity but quick to delegate and defer to specialists. Those kind of “idea people” are awesome to work with. BTW, I’ve also worked with plenty of great “idea people” who were engineers. They are awesome at creating ideas, refining them, AND building them. For an especially entertaining example, check out the Stuff Made Here channel on YouTube —- here’s a person with ideas great enough to attract tens of millions of views AND the electrical, mechanical, and software engineering skills to turn his ideas into reality. https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere
bbqchicken 5y ago
I profess, I'm an ideas guy. I do genuinely want to be a better executor, but I find it difficult to get myself to focus when I sit down to do things. I've come to think maybe I just really don't like technical work, but I've put so much time and effort into my career at this point it's a hard pill to swallow
- joshspankit 5y ago
  Is it possible you have a neuro-distinct brain? (Being up-front: When I came to this post, I expected to see a higher-than-average percentage of people with neuro-distinct brains)
  - EEMac 5y ago
    This term bothers me. Isn't every single human neuro-distinct? Everyone deviates from the average/the norm in some way. If you mean Asperger's/autism, that's a specific thing, and I would be happy to think there's lots of them/us here.
    - joshspankit 5y ago
      To be honest the language bothers me as well, and despite hundreds of conversations I have not yet found the words that say all three of “we’re joined in our humanity”, “differences are valuable as we (societies) need a variety of strengths to make strong teams”, and “no one can be presumed to be anything because of a label”
  - bbqchicken 5y ago
    Setting aside the issues with that term, yes. I've been diagnosed with adhd, Asperger's, and half of every neurosis one ever heard of although I try not to take those labels as an identity. But yeah, in many different phases in life I've been the "huge potential, needs to put in the hard work" person. It gets old
jl2718 5y ago
Let’s talk about what does work. Assume you are a world-class ‘idea person’. That means that you know everything about your field, but you’re maybe not great at the specific skills. You have read everything in the technical literature. You know how your competitors operate and what they are working on. You have deep understanding of the customer. You know exactly why the big idea isn’t already a thing, and why each prior attempt failed. Your job is to help other people organize their thoughts. It’s not to inject your own. Hackers need a lot of support. They need a sounding board to see if the logic make sense or if they are missing something. They might need to identify that one lynchpin problem that needs to be proved before anything else. They might need someone to ask foundational questions about why each component is necessary, or if there is an easier way to achieve the function they they want. They need to know what has been done already. They need to know what has been attempted and failed at, and why. There are a huge number of ways that an ‘idea person’ can contribute. It’s also incredibly annoying and disruptive to push your own ideas on other people, not least because they probably suck, but you knew that, because you are a world-class idea person.

99 points by cjwinans79 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago

There is no such thing as an "idea" person who is valuable because of their ideas. If they appear valuable, it's because they also have actual experience with execution, or more frequently, they have money or connections (which I don't say to necessarily denigrate, this kind of person can be very useful as well.)

cjwinans79 5y ago
Easy to get snowed though if you don't know what to watch out for. That was my motivation for writing this. I've been kicked a couple times by (good intentioned) people that did not realize their success (ideas) had been team efforts.

21eleven 5y ago

An idea is a base quantity. A bad idea maybe worth 1, a good idea 10, a great idea 100. But execution is a multiplier. Good execution is a 10x. Great execution is a 100x. An average idea with excellent execution is worth a lot more than a great idea with poor execution.

_dps 5y ago
This model circulates a lot but I haven't understood why; it literally treats them as the same thing. The model is outcome = idea x execution So both are "multipliers" in the language of the model. The formula is completely symmetric in the two quantities.
- thunkshift1 5y ago
  My two cents: a good idea is 1, A great idea is also 1. It doesn’t mean jack till its usable. So it would be more like - Good idea (1) x good execution(10) = 10 Great idea (1) x great execution (100) = 100 Ex: my great idea is that faster-than-light travel will REVOLUTIONIZE HUMANITY! Of course I’m an idea guy, so I cant be bothered with physics and engineering and special relativity and all that riff-raff. Let a specialized team figure that out. But hear me out - this is a BRILLIANT IDEA when finished. (That’ll be 100M seed funding, thank you very much.)
- kthejoker2 5y ago
  Maybe it's more (idea+1.000001)^execution - 1? * Without execution, an idea is worth 0. * Even without an idea, execution has value - go schedule a 45 minute meeting with a smart person with no set topic and something will happen. * Execution is infinitely more effective than ideas at producing value.

ajb 5y ago

This article has a limited perspective. People have different skill sets, and valorizing one skill set and demonising another is something that is not very helpful. You as an engineer may want to say that your skill set is the most crucial one and others are worth less, but you know what? Other people are going to do the same to you, and often with more success. For example, UX and design is now quite valued, and frequently you hear UX and design guys disparage engineering. Is that something we want to encourage? It's better to encourage making rational decisions about what skill set you need and who is best to supply them, so we are all judged on our merits and not based on self-marketting. Idea-generation is useful in a lot of contexts. Personally my best ideas have often been to figure out a way where we didn't need to execute a bunch of difficult stuff that the execution types were about to take on.

Anointmous 5y ago

It never fails to amaze me how many non technical people - run of the mill (fill-in-a-word) people are on "hacker"news. The person who said that he was an idea person who executes ideas all the time that it was stigmatized by morons is right. In programming in particular, coming up with "ideas" and executing them immediately in your programming is pretty much a constant. And it's arguably what hacker, a real hacker, means by definition of word. My experience is people who don't appreciate ideas are the first to plagiarize them, steal, or cover it up. In fact, its arguably what a lot of current big companies that are stagnating the country are running on. Advice - make sure you have no people in the company you make that think that way. Make it part of the interview - give them an opportunity to say the acceptably stigmatizing thing, and then eliminate them.

vinay_ys 5y ago

I think the ideas vs execution is a false dichotomy. In fast growing startups, there are people who can hack they way out of most problems quickly. Such people are immensely useful during the exploratory phase and early growth phase. If the startup continue on their growth trajectory into next hyper growth phase, they need deep systems thinkers to build better end to end systems that can deal with the inevitable product complexity, org growth and user growth. They obviously cannot build complex systems all by themselves. They need that team of hackers to believe in and execute their systems vision. They are usually good at selling their vision to the hackers as well as to the org leadership. In really successful startups that become unicorns and beyond, there are also great visionary org leaders who can curate and evolve harmonious and motivated teams that execute well to keep pace with the growth of the company. Of course, while in middle of it all, it feels very chaotic and out of control.

CharlesW 5y ago
This reminds me of the classic "Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners": https://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-town-planners.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-t... Related: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
- Animats 5y ago
  This is a classic problem with successful startups. At some point, there's pressure to bring in "adult supervision", which usually means a CEO from a big company. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it makes things much worse. Microsoft and Amazon stayed with the founders for a long time. Apple famously went for an outside CEO, got into trouble, and went back to the founders. Google/Alphabet is back with the founders in charge.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I think, becoming or finding a humble "adult" CEO isn't easy. I worked with brilliant founders, who were really bad managers. It almost seemed like their high skills in engineering came from letting every other part of their personality deteriorate.

b93rn 5y ago

Idea people are most of the time really creative. Creative people are most of the time more chaotic. This article is all about a well balanced team composition in the end. A team full of code robots does not work and a team full of 'idea people' does also not work.

evolve2k 5y ago

I’m an ideas guy and it’s been very frustrating to have to raise to ascend the stigma. I iterate solutions much faster than most. Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding. I know what people are talking about with the “all talk no action” person. That’s not me, some of us really are excellent at iterating good ideas. It’s a discarded skill, but highly valuable once I’m on most teams, I can just never promote this strength due to the stigma.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right, but I think the real key is emphasizing what has been done already and what the immediate next steps are— that puts the accountability out there and keeps the conversation grounded in reality. I think another litmus test for idea-executor vs pure executor is your willingness to do throw-away work. A pure executor reads the design doc, says "sure", and just builds it— an idea-executor recognizes that the long-term maintenance of the system will almost certainly dwarf the initial cost of coding it up, and is willing to extend the discovery phase with partially-functional prototypes and so-on in order to really get a firm handle on whether the thing is going to go where they want it to go. (Recent example— building up chunks of a moderately complicated build setup in parallel in Jenkins Pipeline and GitLab CI in order to understand how the two solutions would compare on maintainability, end user ergonomics, permissions hassles, flexibility, how much documentation we would need to support it, etc etc.)
ackbar03 5y ago
Maybe your not following through enough? I feel like if your one to always iterate on ideas and follow through and do a good job, you'll be more of a bad ass, I doubt there would be any stigma
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  generating an idea or a solution is of course easier than following through, if you generate solutions and ideas quicker than most people it means you will have lots of ideas and solutions, you then need to develop the skill of only saying the best ideas otherwise with all the ideas you will be too enervating (and some times you will fail at this task) furthermore there are some careers that mean you will not develop a reputation for follow through before you develop a reputation for ideas, for example if you are a consultant and brought into a place you will say a lot of ideas before you have the chance to follow through. In these situations you will be seen as all talk no action because you start off with lots of talk and nobody has experienced your actions. I'm sure similar scenarios can spring to mind.

santiagobasulto 5y ago

This describes me perfectly. And the struggle to be better at execution is huge. But with a lot of dedication and habit building I've been able to (partially) overcome it.

slx26 5y ago
Echoing the other comment that was talking about stigma... I think we should at least admit that, of course, without execution ideas aren't worth much, but without ideas you don't even have anything to do. And in fact, most of the people that are not good at "ideas", are not good at executing either. That is, making good plans to create things. Of course, executing as "following orders" is another entirely different category that many more people can fulfill adequately. So, we should look at ourselves to make sure we are not only daydreamers, that ideas don't only work in our heads, that they might actually make sense in the real world too... But creativity is not the same skill as planning, and that's kinda ok too. It's good to keep your feet on the ground to avoid selling dreams, and I also really hate the people that will only talk big and then show no interest on working on some of their "best" ideas, but creativity is not the same as the ability to fully realize ideas, from creative inception to success. This later part requires many skills. Having reasonable and interesting ideas is only one of them.
dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
Funny, it describes the opposite of me. When the high-level idea people start talking, I have already phased out. It seems somewhat useless to me, they spend so many hours talking about possibilities that shatter at the first contact with the real world. Without at least a bit of practical time to attempt things and fail, I am basically useless at design.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  People are good at different things, this is a feature, not a bug. Some people are more explorers, others executors. Probably are lots of other words to fit in there with slightly different meanings. There is some (too much) pressure for everybody to be great at everything and when they are different enough are labeled as having a disease. This is why people work together, to build on each other’s strengths.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

"The armchair quarterback. They love to wax poetic about what could be done yet when asked to get the ball rolling, they show no interest. The act of calling out gaps and offering solutions is their sweet spot." Is this saying that 'calling out gaps and offering solutions' is awesome as long as they help implement the solutions? Asking because for every person I knew who espouses ideas and won't help (too few to recall any) there are scores upon scores upon scores of people who compulsively resist fixes - no matter how many resources are provided for.

waynesonfire 5y ago

>2. Insistence on needing a “team” to implement the idea yet in the paragraph author states, > As it turns out, they’ve spent their career at a big company and didn’t fully realize that much of their success was actually a team effort. Insisting that an idea needs a team means that the person DOES realize that their success was a team effort. Glaring inconsistency, I stopped reading here.

jl2718 5y ago
I have noticed that the only productive unit of execution from idea to functional proof of the idea, is exactly one person. It helps tremendously if they have others to talk to about their idea, ‘idea people’, if you will. But it doesn’t work to have a separation between authority over ideas and responsibility for execution. I assume that is what prototypical ‘idea person’ is looking for in a team.
- dagw 5y ago
  Having worked with 'idea people' at various companies of various sizes, I've found that what the best 'ideas people' bring to the table is the ability to sell that idea up the food chain to get resources and time for the 'execution people' to actually be able to execute.
TchoBeer 5y ago
It's possible that they recognize that a team is necessary for execution (and if they don't realize this nothing gets done) but still think of the product as stemming wholly from them.
fotta 5y ago
Yeah this part really rubbed me the wrong way. Don't buy into an ideas person without committing to providing the proper support. Otherwise that person will get burnt out.
cjwinans79 5y ago
I was pulling from experience. In that instance, you are correct, they did realize it was a team effort. But what I failed to share will hopefully clear up the confusion. They didn't call that out during the hiring process. They talked themselves up as if they could succeed single-handedly. It wasn't shared until they were failing to show progress and then it became an excuse. It wasn't possible to give (or hire) them a team. In the end, the person was let go to find a bigger company with the resources and capacity they would need to succeed. No hard feelings... just not a fit. Does that clear everything up?

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I'm an "execution" guy. I make things happen. Been doing it my entire adult life. It's incredibly valuable, and "idea people" know it. But they won't say it. If I had a dime for every "idea person" that wanted me to realize their harebrained AI-powered cheese straightener, for nothing, and they get all the money and credit, because it's "their idea," I'd be rich. Yeah, I'm cynical.

ascales 5y ago
I feel like this article kinda confuses "idea people" and "people with an idea." Idea people should know how to prove an idea. I've had a lot of similar hairbrained ideas come my way looking to build an MVP for something, and typically the end of our conversation is "use an excel spreadsheet and prototype this idea and come back in 6 months, then I'll charge you $75-$200k to build the tech" I've prototyped enough of my own ideas to know that most ideas are shit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I think a lot of ideas are good, but they need to be "walked through," and refined. They are generally great at the hand-wavy level, but the devil is always in the details. I believe that a lot of these colossal startup failures are great ideas; poorly executed. The people I'm working with now, had a great idea, but didn't have it "thought through." I said "I'll realize it, but expect big changes. I'll be developing a running prototype, and we'll be tossing out things that looked good on paper, but fall flat, in execution." That's exactly what has happened. It takes a lot of patience; on both the "idea person" level, and the "execution person" level. I need to take their ideas seriously, and they need to shut up and pay attention when I catalog the costs of their ideas in the real world. It'll work out, and won't look at all like they thought, but I'm designing an excellent baseline for creativity. It will work very well, will be localizable, accessible, and will allow creatives to put a lot of chrome on things.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    I think you’re both right, but it’s the definition of “an idea” that has some assumptions. Take Noah Kagan’s term “wantrepreneur” as the groundwork for what I mean: Person A’s ideas are: Get business cards, build a website, get pamphlets, buy equipment, buy a business car, and so-on. Person B’s idea is: find 3 clients first, do the rest after. Person A’s ideas are all objectively good, but many of us who have seen businesses come and go won’t count those as ideas, and therefore will say “you have a good idea that needs refining” when talking about the core idea for the business.

wombatmobile 5y ago

> Not every “idea person” is a good fit for your small business. In fact, most will be a terrible fit. How can you tell? TFA goes on to list three characteristics of people who are dud team members, and 5 characteristics of good team members, but it doesn't do what it claimed it will - tell you how to identify such a person at the hiring stage. TFA is an example of what it warns against.

tut-urut-utut 5y ago
Well, just don't hire an "idea person", especially not if your company is not gigantic. If you are running a startup, at least one of the founders is "idea person". You don't need another one, especially not as an employee. It just doesn't bring any value to the business. Hire "execution person" to bring existing ideas further. An if "execution person" is not good, it will show, if not during the hiring phase, then soon later.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  How do you distinguish between candidates at the hiring stage? > if not during the hiring phase, then soon later. How soon? A week? A month? A year? Effective interviewing strategies are valuable to organisations because the trial and error approach to recruitment is so costly and disruptive.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    My comment was that you don’t need to worry about hiring wrong idea person because you should not hire them at all. As for execution person objective criteria exists, and it’s possible to evaluate performance, either at the hiring stage or soon afterwards. Evaluating idea person objectively in a short period of time is way harder.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      If people came with a label that says "Idea Person" or "Execution Person" we could just read their label and do like you say. But what do we do when candidates claim to be both, and there is no label?

ademup 5y ago

Another potential red flag attribute I've witnessed is shifting of the idea deliverablee\objectives after the green light is given. A partner I once had developed a pretty great idea we decided to execute on after 20+ hours of planning. He started proposing entirely new (follow-up) ideas mere hours into our execution. Then started morphing the original plan. 1 week later he was dropping idea bombs left and right. I finally delivered something close to the original plan and he spent the next 2 months slowly backing out of the project entirely, having put in less than 10% of the effort.

rvanlaar 5y ago
That's a recurring experience. Sorry you got bitten by it. I've had it as well and others I know as well. This is normal for what is here given as 'idea' persons. It used to generate a lot of frustrations within me. Now I know that an idea person, or for that matter most entrepreneurs, will have ideas. They'll share their current version with much enthusiasm and will wake up energized the next morning with, for them, tiny iterations on that idea. For others, such as the engineer implementing it, those 'tiny iterations', are completely new and will require large amounts of rework. One of my colleagues described it as the idea person being a little boat that is swarming around a large container ship. The container ship just isn't able to change course on the whims of the little boat.

whatshisface 5y ago

You can only be useful as an ideas guy if you're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. Everyone knows that, and that's why calling yourself and "ideas person" is received in exactly the same way that calling yourself the smartest person in the room is received: with some eye-rolling.

jungturk 5y ago

The "how to start" point resonates with my experience. There's a cohort of "idea" people who are efficient at anticipating and clearing obstacles (including those that occur at inception around "how to start") without actually being all that great at executing those adjustments. I think we value that type of contribution (often allocating it to leaders, though every contributor does it to some extent) even though it might not materialize as "doing" anything.

cjwinans79 5y ago
Yep. In a small, scrappy business, people that can kickstart an effort are highly coveted. When you couple that with great ideation... priceless.

mkl95 5y ago

Daydreaming in software development is imo not a disease but a symptom, and it's a form of escapism. Broken processes, extreme technical debt, tight project constraints, very limited resources, etc. all can lead to engineers wanting a way out.

thibran 5y ago

> While ideas get most of the fanfare, they don’t really matter unless steps are taken to make them work in your business. Stopped reading here. It's not about ideas, it's about having an understanding what could be done. If thinking is grounded in reality and your resource constrains, ideas are worth a lot. Otherwise all your company would do is copy other companies.

circlefavshape 5y ago

Just wanted to add - the worst "ideas person" I ever knew delivered an endless stream of really obvious ideas. An ideas person who delivers good ideas that no-one else has thought of can be useful, independent of their implementation skills

cjwinans79 5y ago
Agreed. There is some room for someone that can provide great ideas, however, small businesses need to (at least) pair them with someone capable of executing. This is more "exception" than rule though.

lordnacho 5y ago

The problem with people who think of ideas and don't try to execute them is that they can't incorporate feedback. At best you get a second-hand explanation of why the magic thing can't be built. You also end up with an attribution problem: it's easy to say what the big idea is, but it takes a lot of work to make it happen. Why give credit to the guy with the big picture, when the big picture is probably something the guy who implements it had as well? Devil is in the details. You also don't get good ideas if you don't try to implement them. The implementation process is a creative process, which btw your ideas guy might not recognize, leading to issues. I've had ideas guys where I worked before, and it was toxic. My view is basically that ideas guys are a kind of leech: they take credit for positive things that are obvious, they come up with excuses for things that are negative (team failed me boohoo), and they don't generate better ideas than people who are doing the implementation. My experience is in quant trading, where you have people who can code, and sometimes people who just fluff about strategies. With the randomness and noise it's easy to be fooled by ideas guys, and it's taken me a long time to just dismiss the concept entirely. I actually just got off an interview where we discussed this problem in the space, and we agreed it's absolutely essential that people can code, otherwise their trading ideas are worthless.

cjwinans79 5y ago
> Devil is in the details. That's why I was quick to call out that ideas have little true value without execution. Ideas are born and die every day. We're naturally creative but we also (generally speaking) don't tend to follow-through. That's the real and hard part.

nobodyandproud 5y ago

Execution takes grit; people skills (if you need to create buy-in); and really some level of belief in the outcome. I had to change the development process and cycle of my team, and even with instant buy-in it was tough.

artembugara 5y ago

> They were great at leading, not doing. Wow, since when "leading" isn't the most difficult/well-paid job in our society? Overall, I think the author is mixing up apples with oranges and that's why this article sounds so weird. It's a very contradicting piece right here.

cjwinans79 5y ago
How so? I wrote from my gut here and am not one to think I have all the answers (far from it). I wasn't attempting to dismiss leadership in any way, shape, or form. Merely calling out the difference between personally "doing" (in the sense of small business) versus the "orchestrating" that is more typical in a larger company. I've worked in both and have seen how people that spent their career in a large company may struggle in a small business setting. No shame. Just a (often overlooked) distinction.

jollybean 5y ago

You need 'ideation' at every stage of the game, in every part of the business. The 'skill' is to distill the ideas into an operational basis. Both ops and new thinking are important.

goldenManatee 5y ago

Given the list of what makes an execution person, would be a dumb mistake for someone like that to work for someone else. If you can do it all yourself, others would just slowly you down, seemingly.

TrevorJ 5y ago

This just sounds like bad understanding of how to hire the right people for the needs of your business. If a coach fields a football team that's made up exclusively of quarterbacks, who's fault is that? A team that can execute flawlessly, but has no vision and no solid ideas is not useful. A team that can come up with a million 'good' ideas, but has no ability to execute is just as bad. Ultimately, your org needs to be built of the right balance of both sets of skills.

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jhinra 5y ago

I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back: > I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot. Link to full post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_an_idea_guy_to_manage_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_...

sobakistodor 5y ago

I've been generating tons of ideas my entire life. This is why I KNOW how cheap the ideas is and, also, how hard it is to implement something and make is usable/working/needed/cheap... And this is why I work as software developer (execution person), not manager\idea-generator. I must keep myself in ABILITY to implement things - this is what i don't have for free, unlike the ability of generating ideas: every day I have 5 new genious ideas of some city garbage collection automation with bidrs or a new neural-network GPS-replacement-by-photo thing. When I hear somene's good idea i STEAL it with no regret/sorry and with clear conscience. When person tell me its really GOOD idea, i just trying to implement it before he found a way to do this (this never happend with idea-people) and I dont give a shit who generated this idea, dont giving any credits to original person intentionally to punish idea-people for not goind anything. Also, knowing my ability to generate tons of ideas I feel no shame to steal another's ideas, because it cost nothing for me: I could generate this idea myself another day easily with the same genius quality. So, idea people, give me you ideas and go to hell. Tomorrow I talk to another idea-person and forget you. Ideas is like air: today i inhale the air who was exhaled by someone else and this is not called stealing. So, you must implement idea to proof its existance. Tell me that I stole your idea looking at my project - i dont care. Your blabla does not change whom MY working project belongs to, sorry, haha.

mattkevan 5y ago

Dreadful article. It’s not hiring the ‘ideas person’ that’s the problem, the problem is not understanding people’s strengths and weaknesses and failing to build a balanced team. Some people are better at coming up with ideas, others are better at executing. Doesn’t mean one is better than the other, they just have different things to offer. A team full of people who ‘get things done’ is just as bad as a team full of ideas people. Belbin states that there actually nine roles needed for effective teams. Most people are strong in a few areas, but it’s almost impossible to be strong in all of them. This article seems like it’s written by a Belbin ‘Shaper’ unable to see value in other people’s skills and viewpoints. https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles

trunnell 5y ago

“Someone that rose through the ranks” IME, being able to actually do the work involved is the single best filter to reduce the risk of “idea people.” People with “great ideas” who also previously did similar work themselves can be hugely valuable. People with “great ideas” who lack first-hand knowledge of the tasks involved are usually not worth following. Usually. The product management role comes to mind as one where we see this rule playing out far too often. However, when I was at Netflix I saw a handful of notable exceptions. One of the Product Managers for recommendation algorithms was an expert at math but not engineering. That person had excellent ideas and was incredibly effective even though they needed a team to build their ideas. Another Product Manager I worked with also lacked an engineering background but was nonetheless very effective as a partner in projects we did together when I was an engineering manager. (In general, I think Netflix has some of the best PMs around.) Elsewhere, I’ve seen PMs routinely fail by promoting infeasible schedules, overreaching into the engineering agendas, or discounting engineers’ ideas—- the type of mistakes that are easy to make when someone lacks first-hand development experience. The PMs who were the exceptions to the rule made up for their lack of first-hand engineering knowledge by years of experience “embedded” into software teams where they could build their sensitivity to engineering issues, which later allowed them to easily defer to engineers and eng. managers when those issues arose. They were also eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and get into the details with you to understand problems. Infinite curiosity but quick to delegate and defer to specialists. Those kind of “idea people” are awesome to work with. BTW, I’ve also worked with plenty of great “idea people” who were engineers. They are awesome at creating ideas, refining them, AND building them. For an especially entertaining example, check out the Stuff Made Here channel on YouTube —- here’s a person with ideas great enough to attract tens of millions of views AND the electrical, mechanical, and software engineering skills to turn his ideas into reality. https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere

bbqchicken 5y ago

I profess, I'm an ideas guy. I do genuinely want to be a better executor, but I find it difficult to get myself to focus when I sit down to do things. I've come to think maybe I just really don't like technical work, but I've put so much time and effort into my career at this point it's a hard pill to swallow

joshspankit 5y ago
Is it possible you have a neuro-distinct brain? (Being up-front: When I came to this post, I expected to see a higher-than-average percentage of people with neuro-distinct brains)
- EEMac 5y ago
  This term bothers me. Isn't every single human neuro-distinct? Everyone deviates from the average/the norm in some way. If you mean Asperger's/autism, that's a specific thing, and I would be happy to think there's lots of them/us here.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    To be honest the language bothers me as well, and despite hundreds of conversations I have not yet found the words that say all three of “we’re joined in our humanity”, “differences are valuable as we (societies) need a variety of strengths to make strong teams”, and “no one can be presumed to be anything because of a label”
- bbqchicken 5y ago
  Setting aside the issues with that term, yes. I've been diagnosed with adhd, Asperger's, and half of every neurosis one ever heard of although I try not to take those labels as an identity. But yeah, in many different phases in life I've been the "huge potential, needs to put in the hard work" person. It gets old

jl2718 5y ago

Let’s talk about what does work. Assume you are a world-class ‘idea person’. That means that you know everything about your field, but you’re maybe not great at the specific skills. You have read everything in the technical literature. You know how your competitors operate and what they are working on. You have deep understanding of the customer. You know exactly why the big idea isn’t already a thing, and why each prior attempt failed. Your job is to help other people organize their thoughts. It’s not to inject your own. Hackers need a lot of support. They need a sounding board to see if the logic make sense or if they are missing something. They might need to identify that one lynchpin problem that needs to be proved before anything else. They might need someone to ask foundational questions about why each component is necessary, or if there is an easier way to achieve the function they they want. They need to know what has been done already. They need to know what has been attempted and failed at, and why. There are a huge number of ways that an ‘idea person’ can contribute. It’s also incredibly annoying and disruptive to push your own ideas on other people, not least because they probably suck, but you knew that, because you are a world-class idea person.