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I disagree... the highest-value problems are often VERY hard. Think of things like natural language recognition, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, an

I disagree... the highest-value problems are often VERY hard. Think of things like natural language recognition, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, and so on. Things that seem like magic to the end user, that they've never seen before, are very hard before they're abstracted into something that B/C players can re-use. Woz, for example, worked some magic and packaged a computer circuit board into something that tons of less-talented people could build on. I would not even want to attempt what he did. Yes, creating a feature like adding a Like button does not take complex thinking, but moving the needle forward significantly often does. I believe this is what Jobs was alluding to.

simonh 14y ago
Absolutely, but also bear in mind Next and Apple worked on some of the hardest problems in the industry. OS kernel design, languages and compilers, development frameworks. Now you can be an ace developer, absolutely A-grade, and be working on a web app in PHP but maybe in that case your leverage over an average dev might be say 10x. Whereas if the problem domain you're working on is something really critical like kernel scheduler design then an A-player might come up with a solution an average dev might never come up with. Not in 100x as long or even 1000x as long.
nahname 14y ago
I feel like we are discussing this from very different perspectives. You raise hard computer science problems and a Woz example that is hardware related. The article was about software, not people who push the envelope of what is possible with computers. If you are tackling problems like natural language recognition you don't need a superstar programmer. You need someone with a background in Computational linguistics. Assuming we are discussing software. Hard computer science problems are, unfortunately, very infrequently brought up in a business setting. The biggest challenge in software is building the right thing. Change is inevitable and solutions are often large. This means you need to have teams of people working together building solutions that are very malleable. Here is another way to consider it from my perspective. The article is about teams of 'A' players. I am guessing Linus meets your criteria, but you don't hire Linus. You don't have teams of Linus'. Linus is something else...

simonh 14y ago

Absolutely, but also bear in mind Next and Apple worked on some of the hardest problems in the industry. OS kernel design, languages and compilers, development frameworks. Now you can be an ace developer, absolutely A-grade, and be working on a web app in PHP but maybe in that case your leverage over an average dev might be say 10x. Whereas if the problem domain you're working on is something really critical like kernel scheduler design then an A-player might come up with a solution an average dev might never come up with. Not in 100x as long or even 1000x as long.

nahname 14y ago

I feel like we are discussing this from very different perspectives. You raise hard computer science problems and a Woz example that is hardware related. The article was about software, not people who push the envelope of what is possible with computers. If you are tackling problems like natural language recognition you don't need a superstar programmer. You need someone with a background in Computational linguistics. Assuming we are discussing software. Hard computer science problems are, unfortunately, very infrequently brought up in a business setting. The biggest challenge in software is building the right thing. Change is inevitable and solutions are often large. This means you need to have teams of people working together building solutions that are very malleable. Here is another way to consider it from my perspective. The article is about teams of 'A' players. I am guessing Linus meets your criteria, but you don't hire Linus. You don't have teams of Linus'. Linus is something else...