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Programming isn't the hard part - the hard part is communicating with people and understanding the problems they need solved. Master that and you will have a jo

Programming isn't the hard part - the hard part is communicating with people and understanding the problems they need solved. Master that and you will have a job for however long you want.

sbilstein 11y ago
Agreed, communication is key to effective development. It's also much harder to find a teacher/mentor for the communication part of the skill set than it is for the technical end.
gizi 11y ago
That depends on how innovative your programming is. Let's take two examples of billionaire programmers: The Google Search guys and the Bitcoin guy. What you see is that they have never, ever asked anybody what problems they needed solved. They imagined something interesting and then they just built it. All preliminary forms of communication with other people would simply have been useless, because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it, and none of use would ever have believed that Bitcoin could work, until we saw it with our own eyes. In other words, if you are doing a truly innovative project, you should not communicate with people but simply ignore them until you are ready to show what you have built, simply because they will not be able to believe that it is possible to fly to the moon, until someone actually does it.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  >because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it, Did you use search engines before Google? It was obviously a shitty experience. And ads? And don't even start on the folks that thought they could categorize the web by hand, or use META tags to sort it all out. So while the Google guys might not have gone around polling people "What can I build that you'd like and would make me rich?", it was far from a dream of a product no one had thought about. Tons of money was going into search engines and portals by the time Google started. And Bitcoin? The dream of e-cash has been around for a while as well; it wasn't a brand new idea. The implementation was a breakthrough, but the idea has been around for a while. (Nitpick: And at current rates, Satoshi's coins are probably worth much less than a billion dollars. And AFAIK, there's been no movement on the blocks people thinks he has.)

Programming isn't the hard part - the hard part is communicating with people and understanding the problems they need solved. Master that and you will have a job for however long you want.

sbilstein 11y ago

Agreed, communication is key to effective development. It's also much harder to find a teacher/mentor for the communication part of the skill set than it is for the technical end.

gizi 11y ago

That depends on how innovative your programming is. Let's take two examples of billionaire programmers: The Google Search guys and the Bitcoin guy. What you see is that they have never, ever asked anybody what problems they needed solved. They imagined something interesting and then they just built it. All preliminary forms of communication with other people would simply have been useless, because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it, and none of use would ever have believed that Bitcoin could work, until we saw it with our own eyes. In other words, if you are doing a truly innovative project, you should not communicate with people but simply ignore them until you are ready to show what you have built, simply because they will not be able to believe that it is possible to fly to the moon, until someone actually does it.

MichaelGG 11y ago
>because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it, Did you use search engines before Google? It was obviously a shitty experience. And ads? And don't even start on the folks that thought they could categorize the web by hand, or use META tags to sort it all out. So while the Google guys might not have gone around polling people "What can I build that you'd like and would make me rich?", it was far from a dream of a product no one had thought about. Tons of money was going into search engines and portals by the time Google started. And Bitcoin? The dream of e-cash has been around for a while as well; it wasn't a brand new idea. The implementation was a breakthrough, but the idea has been around for a while. (Nitpick: And at current rates, Satoshi's coins are probably worth much less than a billion dollars. And AFAIK, there's been no movement on the blocks people thinks he has.)