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I mean, this is largely true in software engineering in general. Programming is easy. Perhaps being an excellent programmer is much harder but for many things b

I mean, this is largely true in software engineering in general. Programming is easy. Perhaps being an excellent programmer is much harder but for many things being mediocre is good enough. The hard part is building things sustainably at scale (people wise or performance wise). That's when a combination of knowing how to manage systemic complexity and knowing how to communicate very well (soft skills) really come into play.

bcrosby95 3y ago
IMHO the hard part with a startup is you don't want to build something that works sustainably at scale. You want to build something that could plausibly morph into something that is sustainable at scale.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  Depends on the stage of the startup lifecycle you're at. But in general, reaching profitability (which is the real hard part) will require making scaling efficient and operations smooth.
- gopher_space 3y ago
  I've started to look at scaling like you're killing a golden-egg-laying goose but there's a 1 in n chance that it'll pay off for you. n starts higher than you'd hope and rises as you make tradeoffs. I've been thinking about scaling a bit because I've been digging into a large SaaS product for a client and find I am able to replicate their locally relevant output at a fraction of the cost. Scaling up has allowed this SaaS to serve an entire country but a majority of their user base think in terms of one or two local counties. Consuming their output means subsidizing work they do that's irrelevant to (or might actually compete with) your own interests.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
There is a weird local optimisation problem where being an excellent programmer can make one a bad software engineer. (Another: unparalleledly excellent Excel skills making one a worse financier.)
- jmcphers 3y ago
  I've seen this so many times in my career. It happens because interviews (especially at the junior level) focus almost exclusively on line-by-line programming acumen. People who excel at those interviews don't always make great software engineers, and sometimes they make terrible ones.
  - kragen 3y ago
    there's a selection bias at play here suppose you need to either be in the top percentile of handsome and the top percentile of emotionally aware to get a job as a hollywood actor, but these attributes are uncorrelated in the general population, so 99% of top-percentile-of-handsome people will be top-percentile-of-sensitive and vice versa then the pool of hollywood actors you observe will contain, out of every 199 people, 99 who are top-percentile-of-handsome but not of sensitivity, 99 who are top-percentile-of-sensitive but not of handsomeness, and 1 who is both someone observing this result but not understanding the process that led up to it might think that emotional sensitivity makes you ugly or that being handsome makes you emotionally oblivious, even though (by hypothesis) the traits are uncorrelated. in fact, this negative correlation in the selected group can survive even a fair bit of positive correlation between the traits in the general population similarly, it's easier to get a programming job if you have a history of delivering successful products, or if you have a lot of line-by-line coding acumen
    - omeze 3y ago
      Berkson’s Paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#:~:text=Berkson's%20paradox%2C%20also%20known%20as,in%20statistical%20tests%20of%20proportions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#:~:text=....
      - kragen 3y ago
        thank you, that's exactly right. he even used my attractive-celebrities example
gnulinux 3y ago
This is what I always say. In college/studying you learn programming, CS, algorithms etc. Once you're a software engineer, you realize that programming, CS, algorithms etc are the easiest part of your job. If the code is too hard for you you're most definitely losing on other things. It sounds very obvious, but think about it, part of being a good software engineer is that programming should be trivial.

bcrosby95 3y ago

IMHO the hard part with a startup is you don't want to build something that works sustainably at scale. You want to build something that could plausibly morph into something that is sustainable at scale.

mgaunard 3y ago
Depends on the stage of the startup lifecycle you're at. But in general, reaching profitability (which is the real hard part) will require making scaling efficient and operations smooth.
gopher_space 3y ago
I've started to look at scaling like you're killing a golden-egg-laying goose but there's a 1 in n chance that it'll pay off for you. n starts higher than you'd hope and rises as you make tradeoffs. I've been thinking about scaling a bit because I've been digging into a large SaaS product for a client and find I am able to replicate their locally relevant output at a fraction of the cost. Scaling up has allowed this SaaS to serve an entire country but a majority of their user base think in terms of one or two local counties. Consuming their output means subsidizing work they do that's irrelevant to (or might actually compete with) your own interests.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

There is a weird local optimisation problem where being an excellent programmer can make one a bad software engineer. (Another: unparalleledly excellent Excel skills making one a worse financier.)

jmcphers 3y ago
I've seen this so many times in my career. It happens because interviews (especially at the junior level) focus almost exclusively on line-by-line programming acumen. People who excel at those interviews don't always make great software engineers, and sometimes they make terrible ones.
- kragen 3y ago
  there's a selection bias at play here suppose you need to either be in the top percentile of handsome and the top percentile of emotionally aware to get a job as a hollywood actor, but these attributes are uncorrelated in the general population, so 99% of top-percentile-of-handsome people will be top-percentile-of-sensitive and vice versa then the pool of hollywood actors you observe will contain, out of every 199 people, 99 who are top-percentile-of-handsome but not of sensitivity, 99 who are top-percentile-of-sensitive but not of handsomeness, and 1 who is both someone observing this result but not understanding the process that led up to it might think that emotional sensitivity makes you ugly or that being handsome makes you emotionally oblivious, even though (by hypothesis) the traits are uncorrelated. in fact, this negative correlation in the selected group can survive even a fair bit of positive correlation between the traits in the general population similarly, it's easier to get a programming job if you have a history of delivering successful products, or if you have a lot of line-by-line coding acumen
  - omeze 3y ago
    Berkson’s Paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#:~:text=Berkson's%20paradox%2C%20also%20known%20as,in%20statistical%20tests%20of%20proportions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#:~:text=....
    - kragen 3y ago
      thank you, that's exactly right. he even used my attractive-celebrities example

gnulinux 3y ago

This is what I always say. In college/studying you learn programming, CS, algorithms etc. Once you're a software engineer, you realize that programming, CS, algorithms etc are the easiest part of your job. If the code is too hard for you you're most definitely losing on other things. It sounds very obvious, but think about it, part of being a good software engineer is that programming should be trivial.