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I'm curious about the "knack" vs "background" comparisons between business guys and engineers. Assuming they one has a "knack" for both coding and business, in

• codeonfire 15y ago
  You've probably heard something similar to the adage that it take minutes to become a bad businessman and years to become a bad engineer. In other words, one can be bad at business but there is nothing physically stopping someone from making bad decisions, pitches, purchase, contracts, hires, or whatever else a "businessman" does. The CS guy might get lucky if the economics are in a forgiving phase or everybody wants what he is trying to sell. On the engineering side, there is a hard barrier where quality simply can't be traded for time. Yes, anyone can pick up a book and put together a simple application, but a simple application isn't going to be valuable. Each new feature is likely to take weeks and there would be little improvement as each challenge would be its own technical journey. Need to use a database to do something complex? that's a month of trial and error learning. Need to integrate? another month of learning web services and networking basics. Need to think about security? another month, and on and on. If the MBA turned developer doesn't put in the time, it simply won't work. There is no duct taping together some code snippets to get something of value. Granted, anyone can put together something simple, but they will quickly hit a point where further progress is not possible without lots and lots of time.