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I hate to admit this as an engineer, but the people who make a difference are working at the strategy level and not the implementation level, which is where mos

I hate to admit this as an engineer, but the people who make a difference are working at the strategy level and not the implementation level, which is where most of us engineers spend our time. No world-changing startup ever failed because "we couldn't get the code right" -- they fail because they build things the world doesn't want, or they fail to market the things they build to people who want them. The second difficult-to-admit thing is that software is only good at solving problems where analyzing information and manipulating data are the solution. Mobile banking apps are doing tremendous good in developing countries -- but the benefits of things like mosquito nets, water purification, and vaccination are not software problems. I'm pretty doubtful that apps will do much to alleviate poverty, although I'm excited and encouraging of the people who are trying.

hkmurakami 11y ago
While what you are saying isn't entirely without merit, isn't that like saying that the success of the Apollo missions lie with the bureaucrats rather than the engineers and astronauts?
- rawnlq 11y ago
  Sure many individual engineers are remembered, such as Margaret Hamilton: https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-project-apollo-158754170da8 https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-soft... But nowadays projects are built by hundreds if not thousands of engineers. They are all necessary but no individual engineer is irreplaceable or particularly important.
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  I'm saying that man wouldn't have set foot on the moon without John F. Kennedy declaring it would be so, but man would probably still have walked on the moon if the Apollo engineering team were slightly less skilled. (Probably would have taken longer and had more deadly failures, so thank God for the highly-skilled people who worked together to make it all possible, but engineering skill adds incremental improvement because efficacy becomes more dispersed the further down the pyramid you go -- that's just the nature of human organizations, the implementers are fungible.)
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    You don't think a bunch of astronaut deaths and costly mission failures would've eventually eroded public will?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Depends on the mix. As long as there are some spectacular successes, there will be interest.
    - eastbayjake 11y ago
      A bunch of astronauts did die at the very beginning: Apollo 1 blew up on the launch pad. There was outrage in Congress but it died down because LBJ (a huge NASA supporter) used his (in)famous strong-arm political leadership to push forward. Again: strategy and leadership were more important than implementation. LBJ was more important for pushing Apollo forward than NASA's engineering success (or lack thereof). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout
- gharbad 11y ago
  There is a very strong case for that line of thinking. The bureaucrats and politicians created an environment where society valued the work on Apollo as well as a very significant budget. Without the politics, the Apollo missions wouldn't have happened.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
Wrong. Plenty of engineers can strategize and implement. Both skills utilized in harmony are required to change the world. If you manage nothing you gain nothing, just like if you direct your work randomly without any strategic planning, you also gain nothing. This does not mean you need one person for each role. Just note two things: Strategizing is usually easier then implementation. It is by far easier to Imagine something then it is to make that imagination real. The people who strategize will usually, unjustly get more credit then the people who implement. This applies both to failure and success.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Well one big exception being Bitcoin, for some values of "change the world". Without BTC, maybe dark markets wouldn't have taken off, and who knows how many people would go without access to medicines, or deal with quality/legal/violence issues. People thought of digital money before, but Bitcoin's implementation set it apart, no? Perhaps the same can be said for Tor, as well.
- Kephael 11y ago
  I've never seen a legal use of Tor in a Western country.
carc 11y ago
I think you're a bit off base about the implementation level not making much of a difference compared to the strategy level. Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen a team of full stack developers build an ambitious web UI with lots of complicated data visualizations/animations/interactions/etc. There were tons of performance issues because they did not understand the browser/javascript/css well enough to optimize things. A front end pro needed to go in and salvage the whole thing because it was not usable. Another anecdote I personally have is a friend who is obsessed with being an entrepreneur. He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. Strategy is nothing without good implementation, and implementation is nothing without good strategy.
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  > Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen engineers fail at a task. I've never seen an entire startup fail because of bad engineering -- they fail because they don't have paying customers, and the lack of paying customers is usually not because "our app doesn't work just right." Users will keep using clunky apps that solve a real problem for them, but they abandon apps that don't solve a real problem. > He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. That seems beside the point, doesn't it? We're not talking about whether implementation is completely unimportant, merely that the biggest lever is strategy (the idea itself, the marketing, the leadership that makes decisions about how to reach product-market fit) and not implementation. Let's say your friend is actually a semi-decent engineer. Would his app be 10% better if he were a 10% better engineer? Probably not. Yelp is ugly as sin but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Tinder chat is broken beyond belief but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Those companies have reached success through strategy and not implementation. You could make Yelp or Tinder 10% better from an engineering perspective, but that's not going to produce a 10% increase in users... I'd be surprised if it produced any growth in users at all actually.

hkmurakami 11y ago

While what you are saying isn't entirely without merit, isn't that like saying that the success of the Apollo missions lie with the bureaucrats rather than the engineers and astronauts?

rawnlq 11y ago
Sure many individual engineers are remembered, such as Margaret Hamilton: https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-project-apollo-158754170da8 https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-soft... But nowadays projects are built by hundreds if not thousands of engineers. They are all necessary but no individual engineer is irreplaceable or particularly important.
eastbayjake 11y ago
I'm saying that man wouldn't have set foot on the moon without John F. Kennedy declaring it would be so, but man would probably still have walked on the moon if the Apollo engineering team were slightly less skilled. (Probably would have taken longer and had more deadly failures, so thank God for the highly-skilled people who worked together to make it all possible, but engineering skill adds incremental improvement because efficacy becomes more dispersed the further down the pyramid you go -- that's just the nature of human organizations, the implementers are fungible.)
- nmrm2 11y ago
  You don't think a bunch of astronaut deaths and costly mission failures would've eventually eroded public will?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Depends on the mix. As long as there are some spectacular successes, there will be interest.
  - eastbayjake 11y ago
    A bunch of astronauts did die at the very beginning: Apollo 1 blew up on the launch pad. There was outrage in Congress but it died down because LBJ (a huge NASA supporter) used his (in)famous strong-arm political leadership to push forward. Again: strategy and leadership were more important than implementation. LBJ was more important for pushing Apollo forward than NASA's engineering success (or lack thereof). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout
gharbad 11y ago
There is a very strong case for that line of thinking. The bureaucrats and politicians created an environment where society valued the work on Apollo as well as a very significant budget. Without the politics, the Apollo missions wouldn't have happened.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

Wrong. Plenty of engineers can strategize and implement. Both skills utilized in harmony are required to change the world. If you manage nothing you gain nothing, just like if you direct your work randomly without any strategic planning, you also gain nothing. This does not mean you need one person for each role. Just note two things: Strategizing is usually easier then implementation. It is by far easier to Imagine something then it is to make that imagination real. The people who strategize will usually, unjustly get more credit then the people who implement. This applies both to failure and success.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Well one big exception being Bitcoin, for some values of "change the world". Without BTC, maybe dark markets wouldn't have taken off, and who knows how many people would go without access to medicines, or deal with quality/legal/violence issues. People thought of digital money before, but Bitcoin's implementation set it apart, no? Perhaps the same can be said for Tor, as well.

Kephael 11y ago
I've never seen a legal use of Tor in a Western country.

carc 11y ago

I think you're a bit off base about the implementation level not making much of a difference compared to the strategy level. Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen a team of full stack developers build an ambitious web UI with lots of complicated data visualizations/animations/interactions/etc. There were tons of performance issues because they did not understand the browser/javascript/css well enough to optimize things. A front end pro needed to go in and salvage the whole thing because it was not usable. Another anecdote I personally have is a friend who is obsessed with being an entrepreneur. He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. Strategy is nothing without good implementation, and implementation is nothing without good strategy.

eastbayjake 11y ago
> Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen engineers fail at a task. I've never seen an entire startup fail because of bad engineering -- they fail because they don't have paying customers, and the lack of paying customers is usually not because "our app doesn't work just right." Users will keep using clunky apps that solve a real problem for them, but they abandon apps that don't solve a real problem. > He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. That seems beside the point, doesn't it? We're not talking about whether implementation is completely unimportant, merely that the biggest lever is strategy (the idea itself, the marketing, the leadership that makes decisions about how to reach product-market fit) and not implementation. Let's say your friend is actually a semi-decent engineer. Would his app be 10% better if he were a 10% better engineer? Probably not. Yelp is ugly as sin but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Tinder chat is broken beyond belief but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Those companies have reached success through strategy and not implementation. You could make Yelp or Tinder 10% better from an engineering perspective, but that's not going to produce a 10% increase in users... I'd be surprised if it produced any growth in users at all actually.