Even the "Idea Person" Should Learn How To Code 217
theodp writes: "A few months ago," writes Steph Rhee, "I was at a dinner with a dozen students and a 60-year-old entrepreneur who made himself a fortune on Wall Street. At the time, I was a junior at Yale and the only person at the table studying a computer-related major. We went around saying what our big dreams were. When I said that I'm studying computer science because I want to be a software engineer and hope to start my own company one day, he said, 'Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?'" But Rhee isn't buying into the idea of the look-Ma-no-tech-skills "idea person." "We must not neglect the merits of technical skills in the conception of the 'idea person,'" she argues. "What the 60-year old entrepreneur and others of his generation — the people in control of the education we receive — don't realize is this: for college students dreaming of becoming unicorns in Silicon Valley, being an 'idea person' is not liberating at all. Being able to design and develop is liberating because that lets you make stuff. This should be a part of what we see in the 'idea person' today and what it means to be 'right' when designing an undergraduate curriculum."
useless idea person... (Score:5, Insightful)
for every 100 "idea" persons there is 1 who not only has the ideas but knows enough that those ideas are sane and sensible. This is why the "idea person" is a fool and treated as such.
You see these guys on shows like The Apprentice, the ones who have no talent or skills and so have to fall back on their mouths. They're simply salesmen who always get shown up to be useless in the end. Even a true businessman has plenty of skills they have to learn around organisation and management (real skills, not just shouting at people and pretending they know what they're doing).
So: Idea people, get a clue.There's no easy way to skip the essential steps of truly knowing what you're doing unless you learn those skills.
Very finance specific (Score:5, Interesting)
a 60-year-old entrepreneur who made himself a fortune on Wall Street
The con, sorry, finance industry is one of the few areas where sane thinking only leads to people jumping ship instead of production. In real professions, you'd better know what you are talking about.
I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning.
Re:Very finance specific (Score:5, Interesting)
I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning.
Apparently, 1 in 100 persons is a psychopath. In the finance industries, among CEOs, military leaders and politicians, that rate is much worse. And there are always the narcissists, the authoritarian followers and the plain stupid. How do you think "they" get anybody to fight wars, to spy on everybody, etc.?
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"How do you think "they" get anybody to fight wars, to spy on everybody, etc.?"
Well its a good thing that someone is willing to fight wars and undertake spying or we'd all be speaking german and goose stepping to work. Yeah I know, Godwin etc, but in this case its a valid counterpoint.
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Well its a good thing that someone is willing to fight wars and undertake spying or we'd all be speaking german and goose stepping to work.
Political skullduggery led to WWI led to WWII. So no, without people willing to fight wars and undertake spying there would never have been a WWI, let alone a WWII.
Yeah I know, Godwin etc, but in this case its a valid counterpoint.
No, because it's not even a valid argument.
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Well there are always going to be psychopaths who start wars - its up to good people to finish them. Its a pity people like you don't appreciate the sacrifice others made for you to have your comfortable 21st century existence , but there we go, ideology trumps reality once more.
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Its a pity people like you don't appreciate the sacrifice others made for you to have your comfortable 21st century existence
The problem with that idea is that these wars are engineered so that certain people can profit, so that's really not what they made a sacrifice for, is it? They were sacrificed on the altar of profit.
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So what is your solution when someone (maybe for profit or out of madness or for power) invades another country? "Refuse to play?"
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So what is your solution when someone (maybe for profit or out of madness or for power) invades another country?
No, you've got it ass-backwards. My solution comes before someone invades another country.
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You are assuming the entire world adopts your solution.
Re:Very finance specific (Score:4, Insightful)
The psychopaths are not enough to start wars. For that they need the stupid, the narcissistic and the authoritarian followers.
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You must be stupid, as my argument quite clearly works for the side that initiated the war...
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Apparently, 1 in 100 persons is a psychopath. In the finance industries, among CEOs, military leaders and politicians, that rate is much worse. And there are always the narcissists, the authoritarian followers and the plain stupid. How do you think "they" get anybody to fight wars, to spy on everybody, etc.?
Not too long ago there was something going around from a cop saying he thought 15% were good cops, 15% were bad cops, and the rest were just followers who would go along with whatever was happening around them. Cop jobs will tend to attract bullies more than other jobs, so the percentages might be skewed, but I think we'd find that maybe only 1% of the population is psychopathic, but at least 5-10% is also sociopathic.
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Sounds plausible. The biggest problem are the 70% that will do whatever they are told to do. Those are the ones that rounded up the Jews in the 3rd Reich (there were official orders to do that, after all), the ones that fight for completely senseless and destructive causes like the "War on Drugs" and those that will commit atrocities like charging 6 year olds with sexual assault or arresting teenagers sexting each other for creation of child porn. People that have no moral compass, yet would urgently need o
Actually it's 1 in 25 (Score:2)
I recently read this book [goodreads.com] this documentary [youtube.com] is based on. The doctor who wrote it harps on this point to the degree it sounds preachy and fear mongery in the text.
The most interesting parts of the book were the stories which were ostensibly from cases with the names changed.
How? Easily. (Score:2)
I worked in IT in finance and can quite happily look at myself in the mirror thanks. It wasn't out of choice but a job came my way and I took it because those of us who don't live still live with our parents have rent/mortgages and other bills to pay and a family to support. And sadly you generally can't do that with self righteous right-on ideals powered by unicorns and moonbeams.
Yes, I'm part of the system, but guess what - society IS the system.
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I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning.
One of the least attractive qualities of the geek is his readiness to denigrate skills he doesn't have and doesn't understand, marketing and finance being among the most obvious.
Re:Very finance specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning."
BY reading Ayn Rand.
Re:useless idea person... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is value from someone outside the box. Normally I like to work with the lowest ranking person who would be using such a tool. As they are often the ones with the best ideas, because they know what is going on at the detail level. Not some high up Big Picture Idea guy. Who just crams features that may or may not be useful. Also dealing only with techs (unless your product is made for them) can be not productive, as they will normally resolve down to what is easiest to build, because to make a good product, you will sometimes need to push the boundaries a bit more.
Now that said. Any ideas needs to be balanced with the limitation of technology. I had to once reject a customer who wanted me to make an App to do the following. OCR documents, If the document date (which was not formally standardized, nor was willing to standardize it) was past the data retention period would flag the document to be deleted, as well put them in a work queue for the hard copies to be destroyed. I had to turn them down, because the application was a constant high risk of huge failure. OCR isn't perfect, the fact that the date wasn't standardized made it worse, combined the result is intended to cause data loss means any glitch is a problem. I offered an alternate solution, where when they store the documents they enter the retention date, manually, and if they added a bar code to them it would make the process simpler. However that required too much manual effort. He just wanted to put a stack of documents on a scanner. Scan them and have everything go automatically.
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Very much this. The inane stories about all the things computers will be able to do are mainly a result from "idea" people that have no clue.
Re:useless idea person... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Good ideas, even brilliant ideas, are a dime a dozen. It is the execution that matters, and great execution is a very rare bird indeed.
But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code. I see it at my university, where enrollments in our entry-level CS course are going through the roof. Everyone is taking a programming class because all the talking heads tell them they should.
Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer any more that teaching him to shoot a basketball makes him into a professional player.
Good programmers become "good" by immersing themselves in the language and the problem to be solved. It requires a degree of focus and experience that you won't get from a few simple programming assignments. So what happens if you make your "idea man" take a two-week short course in the fundamentals of programming? He'll write that "Hello World" app, think to himself "Is this all there is to programming?" and become even more dismissive of the profession than he was before.
If you're going to teach programming, focus your efforts on the people with a genuine interest in the subject. Wasting time and money on people with no real aptitude or interest is like teaching a chimpanzee to pretend to play the piano: it makes for a cute article in the news, but it's no substitute for real talent and ability.
Re:useless idea person... (Score:5, Insightful)
But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code.
What makes it too-common? I don't see it that often.
Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer
Look, we have this concept of an individual who is "well-rounded" not by accident, but because we have seen that people who know more about more stuff have more intelligent things to say. As it turns out, things you learn in one area often have broad applicability. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have a screwdriver, the world looks like a different place. When you have a whole garage full of tools, it looks different again.
Heinlein had it right when he said that specialization was for insects. Life is too short for anyone to become a master of all trades, but life is too wondrous to restrict one's learning to a single discipline. Live a little. Learn. Experience.
The value in teaching everyone beginning programming is a lot like the value in teaching everyone a foreign language, or a musical instrument. Not everyone is going to become a master. Many will not even develop competence. But at minimum, they will become more aware of how the world works, and be able to make better-informed decisions. They will actually learn to see things differently and approach things in different ways. They will have a different idea of what is possible than people who don't know what they know.
TL;DR: It's a waste to try to make everyone into a programmer, but it's not a waste to teach everyone about programming.
Re:useless idea person... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am the last person to argue against a well-rounded education, or to giving people the opportunity to learn whatever they want. But the idea that "we should teach everyone about programming" is, in my opinion, another example of the educational fad mindset that sweeps through society every few years, i.e. "subject XYZ is so important, that we should make everyone learn about it!"
Sorry, but I disagree. If you want better-rounded students, make them take more courses in science or mathematics. Make them learn a second language, or learn to play an instrument. Have them take classes in rhetoric, and learn to make presentations in front of an audience. There are dozens of different classical subjects that will do a better job of providing that broad base of experience and knowledge that you'll need as you go through life.
But programming is too specialized. Now many Slashdot readers will disagree, but most of them think of programming as something so familiar that they can't comprehend why anyone wouldn't see the value in learning about it. Let me provide a different example to illustrate my point.
Consider: Electronics is everywhere today, embedded in almost everything we use in our work or our entertainment. Since electronics is so incredibly important to modern society, we must encourage every student to learn about electronic circuits. Let's have them all design and build simple electronic circuits. At the very least, let's have them all work with Arduino boards and learn the fundamentals of hardware systems.
If one were to make that argument, it would be dismissed out of hand, as it would for any one of a hundred other topics that are absolutely integral to a high-tech civilization. Electronics is too complex and specialized; at best you could only provide a cursory experience to students. Would it still be valuable to some of them? No doubt. But does that mean we should make everyone take a class in electronics? Not at all.
Programming is no different. Learning to program requires learning a considerable amount of syntax to accomplish anything significant, and the "language-du-jour" (do you teach Basic? Fortran? Cobol? Java? C+? Swift?, etc.) changes constantly. So what you wind up with is a cursory exposure to the topic, in a language that may or may even be considered mainstream in five years. It might lead some people to learning more about programming, but does that mean it was the best use of society's limited educational resources, as opposed to a broader instruction in science or mathematics? I would argue "no".
In the ideal world, we'd all be Renaissance men and women, but in the real world people tend to focus strictly on what interests them, or on what makes money. Educational fads come and go, but they never make much traction against basic human nature. Saying "everyone should learn about programming" is no different.
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If one were to make that argument, it would be dismissed out of hand,
Last I checked, very basic electronics was part of the physics syllabus. It also comes up in DT which is taught at a large number of schools in the UK.
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I learned some very basics about circuits in grade 9 science, which was a mandatory class. You learn about resistors, capacitors, inductors, and make calculations of circuits involving them in DC current. I can't remember if we wired up a breadboard to make lights respond to switches at that time, or if that came later.
Didn't really dive into AC current calculations until we hit classes that were not mandatory, although of course we talked in broad strokes about it.
I don't dismiss the electronics course i
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A two-week short course sounds pretty silly. 2 semesters sounds better. And a well-structured programming course for non-majors should focus less on the particulars of a certain language and more on how to think logically and break a problem down into parts. These are skills that many people lack and which will serve people well even if they never do more programming in their life. It just happens that programming is an ideal structure to teach this in. This is also why geometry is a good thing to teach, ev
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But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code
Well, you're guilty of spreading the meme that not everyone should.
We expect everyone to learn to do maths, to be able to read, to know something of history an geography, to be able to speak a foreign language, to understand the basics of physics, chemistry and biology, not to mention analyse works of literature and draw a picture. Understanding something about computers (i.e. learning to code) is a prefectly
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And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, most of them excelled, not because of their technical skills but because of their ideas. The best technical skills in the world don't mean a thing if you can't envision how to use them for something others want. Put differently, it is a lot easier to teach others to code than it is to teach them to think creatively.
Re:useless idea person... (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, most of them excelled, not because of their technical skills but because of their ideas.
And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, all of them excelled in part because of their technical skills, which formed their ideas. Sometimes they lacked the technical ability to carry their ideas to completion without assistance, but that's a mark of every great human endeavor.
Bill Gates was a programmer, albeit a mediocre one. Steve Jobs was also a bad programmer, and a worse EE... but he could at least build circuits and write code. These people excelled because of their ideas, but their ideas were founded in reality because they did have skills, even if they weren't exceptional in those areas.
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Yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs knew how to program. They both were mediocre cooks, too, but they didn't become famous chefs because of that. Both Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many others had a vision of what the technology could do before others around them did and they were able to capitalize on that.
Another commonality between the two was that they both knew their strengths and weaknesses and surrounded themselves with people who made up for those weaknesses.
Finally, they both happened to be in the right pl
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And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, most of them excelled, not because of their technical skills but because of their ideas. The best technical skills in the world don't mean a thing if you can't envision how to use them for something others want. Put differently, it is a lot easier to teach others to code than it is to teach them to think creatively.
No, they didn't succeed because of their ideas, but because they managed to put money where their mouth is, and got the finances to turn the idea into something that can be sold.
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And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, most of them excelled, not because of their technical skills but because of their ideas. The best technical skills in the world don't mean a thing if you can't envision how to use them for something others want. Put differently, it is a lot easier to teach others to code than it is to teach them to think creatively.
No, they didn't succeed because of their ideas, but because they managed to put money where their mouth is, and got the finances to turn the idea into something that can be sold.
Not in the beginning. Take Microsoft, for example, it was a pretty small company headed by a college dropout that saw what DOS could do and what a number Xerox products could do when their actual creators couldn't. That's called vision or ideas. Yes, they had to finance those things, but usually, that isn't the visionary part of the work.
Even beyond the startup stage, Microsoft and Apple weren't/aren't innovators in the traditional sense. Apple didn't make the first music player or the first smartphone, for
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I disagree. I think coders should all be forced to learn to learn the intricacies of investment.
Because, naturally, there can only be ONE human thinking skill which rules them all, and which people who are gifted in other areas should be forced to struggle through.
Wrong (Score:2)
Who cares about implementation? What is really needed is the ability to sell an idea to get investors to finance your company while getting the details people to work for stock options until you find a sucker to buy your company for a fortune. Then you move on to the next Big Idea.
Seems obvious (Score:4)
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There is a lot of talk about Thinking Outside the Box. However that is rarely useful, and doesn't happen. I have been credited and celebrated for my out of the box solutions to problems. However they were not really outside the box, just not how things were normally done.
1. Everyone has a different box to think in. Their experience determines its size.
2. Many of the ideas may be standard in each box, however some ideas are unique to a box, differences in skill sets determines this.
3. Fear normally keeps
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I think the bar you're setting for "outside the box" might be too high. It reminds me of when people talk about "originality" in art, and dismiss everything as "unoriginal" because it was inspired by something or other. Set a standard so high it can't be reached.
I do a lot of what people consider "outside the box" thinking, but in my mind, it's really just "taking a step back". Are we asking the right questions? Are we trying to accomplish the right goal? To give a simple/obvious example, a client say
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I am not sure if I follow your example.
Normally getting a faster box, will improve performance is a given. The more outside the box would be the following.
With having your DB running in volatile RAM. What changes are needed to prevent sudden power outages. Would the time it would take do do a safe shutdown be increased ( as more data will need to be saved )
Being that it is running in RAM, should we go back to a slower/cheaper magnetic drives again.
Outside of the box, is considering items that are beyond t
As long as they're not forced (Score:3)
Re:As long as they're not forced (Score:4)
Just like how we are forced to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic.
In today's world, everyone should have a basic level of programming skills, I don't think it needs to be comprehensive, but to a level where they can solve simple problems and know where your limitations are. Basic Programming literacy should be at least the following
IF conditionals (with AND and OR)
LOOPs
Varables
and nesting.
Mostly a CS101 type of stuff. But that should be generic everyone is taught skills.
Not so they can grow up to be programmers, and software developers, but as a tool to train their brain in different methods of solving issues.
We have Liberal Art skills, that gives critical thinking
We have Mathematics that gives us tools that we can use to solve problems.
Computer science is actually a good way to glue both together. You want to create, you have an problem, you can use the tools of math in different ways to help create a solution.
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Not to mention basic set logic using Venn diagrams (All feebs are groobs, and some groobs are neeves, so are some feebs neeves?), and I'm sure some elementary propositional logic is still taught (i.e. your standard Boolean stuff) at some point.
If you really think about it, what is good programming but reading and writing complex arithmetic and logic (along with short prose comments, one would hope) in a clear and concise m
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I disagree. I mean, I agree that not everyone should be a programmer, but I think everyone should have a general idea of how programming works, if possible, since it drastically improves a person's understanding of how computers work, and what computers can (or can't) do.
I know a bit of programming. Not enough to consider myself a programmer, but enough to write little bash/ruby/powersheel/php/javascript when I need to. I find it tremendously useful, and I don't like the idea that I shouldn't have learn
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Not everyone is cut out for making effective Power Point presentations but we got rid of standalone presentation makers years ago. It's what my dad used to do. Now everyone puts together their own presentations (For better or worse). Coding is going to end up being the same may.
You'll have mid level managers that can do it effectively to convey their idea. There will be mid level managers that put together terrible pieces of code.
My manager learned VBA and uses it for everything. It's gotten to the point wh
The problem with that (Score:2)
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Yea. Everyone thinks all others code sucks.
There is a degree of temperament from experience that we need to account for that.
Now what we as Engineers can do, is improve on the design, get rid of those calls to Microsoft Access, and switch it to a more sturdy relational database. Fix the indenting so it makes sense. Finding the Copy and paste code and make functions and procedures out of them. And sometimes you will just need to tolerate the weirdness and when you figure it out put a comment explaining it.
Gr
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"Idea persons" should focus on "ideas", on "big pictures", on "marketing perspectives" or on whatever they do;
Sounds like you don't have a very clear perspective of what "idea persons" do. Maybe you are not the best person to give advice to them. Maybe Steph Ree's advice is better than yours, because she does have that perspective.
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Listen to the old guy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Here are some engineers [wikipedia.org] who became very rich. They needed investors to start the company and through that company's success become investors in new companies.
Would that 60 year old entrepreneur have the vision these guys had to not only get rich, but make things and have helped shape the world we live in today
Re:Listen to the old guy (Score:4, Insightful)
And in the process, he will have had a massive negative influence on society. Too many like him and everything collapses.
Re:Listen to the old guy (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding good programmers is hard.
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Unfortunately, when most people think of programmers, they think of the most common variety - web programmers. Unfortunately, what most don't realize is that web programmers in general are to programming what community colleges are to higher education (though there may be exceptions) .
A stepping stone that proves you can be trained at a fraction of the cost? Your elitist bullshit about 4 year universities is just that... bullshit. Coding isn't magic. Yes truly good coders aren't common but just because someone learns a practical skill doesn't mean they're incapable of learning more "sophisticated" skills as well.
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Being a "coding wage slave" is much more attractive to me than being a sleazeball big money "if I don't understand it it can't be important" douchebag. Those folks have to fuck over half the country to get to that early retirement. I would rather not be that guy, even if it means I can't retire early.
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Yes Listen to the old guy, he has years of experience, and is at a point where he has little to fear from retaliation. You may be asking to solve problems that had been solved before. We have found cycles in computing where old ideas come back up new again.
The early computers: They just ran one program for one user.
Mainframes: One computer for many programs and users either with Time Sharing or multi-tasking
Desktops: A computer for each person again.
Cloud Computing: Many people accessing a computing infras
Re:Listen to the old guy (Score:4, Insightful)
"A Cloud infrastructure is more fault tolerant and has less single point of failures then a mainframe."
Really? How many times has Azure gone done now? Mainframes are built to be resilient - they have to be as most of them need to run 24/7/365 for decades at a time. When a major bank decides to run its back end processing systems on a "cloud" service then I might sit up and take cloud systems seriously.
"So they are not passing down their wisdom and training replacements, but staying in the job until they die, leaving a gap that is hard to fill. "
If the old guy is doing something like COBOL which the younger coders don't want to learn then whats the alternative?
"By the time you peak in your career, you should be working on a succession plan, trying to get the new guys to work with you, "
Don't be daft. Its not the coders job to sort out training for his potential replacement, thats up to company management to arrange it. Most coders I know have enough on their hands just trying to meet deadlines without being some sort of kiddy coder support service.
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I just checked that last 90 days of ncidents for eastern US for Azure [microsoft.com]. And I saw 19 incidents. None of them accounts for a full outage, only a particular feature may be down.
I have worked with mainframe maintenance. For one this "24/7/365 for decades at a time" isn't really true. As even the best maintained system will have scheduled outages. Otherwise you may have a "God help us if this system ever fails" issue, as a failure over such time could show off all the other systems that have failed.
I have see
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"None of them accounts for a full outage, only a particular feature may be down."
Total failure:
18th August 2014
19th november 2014
"As even the best maintained system will have scheduled outages"
Scheduled outages are one thing, failures are another entirely. And usually with mainframes its only a few nodes/VMs that are taken offline at any given time. The hardware itself keeps on trucking.
"So much so that the application ran completely in active RAM, and once the system went down, we found out the drives fail
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How many down times do Mainframes get per year...
I work with mainframe systems... And they go down 3 or 4 times a year. Sure it is not a full system freeze, but enough to stop work. You are just hating cloud because it is buzzwordy and afraid that it will take your job.
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Or maybe it is a burden... (Score:3)
...Being able to design and develop is liberating because that lets you make stuff..../quote> That citation comes from a person who does happen to find it liberating to be able to design and develop.
.
What if a person does not find that liberating but burdensome? Why push someone to do something they find to be burdensome?
This article looks like a case of I like it, therefore everyone likes it.
Ideas are overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideas are heavily overrated. It's the execution that makes the difference.
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Execution is heavily overrated too, at least here on /..
100% perfect exectution usually don't turn a bad idea to a good product, but a great idea, even with flaky execution, can be a commercial success.
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100% perfect execution can turn a bad idea into something that is still bad but sells well.
Flaky execution of a great idea can be a commercial success for your competitors after they take the idea and execute it better.
What an idiot (Score:3)
Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin -- none of them knew how to code, right?
Re: What an idiot (Score:2)
In case it wasn't immediately obvious, that was sarcasm.
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Steve Jobs leeched off his better cofoiunder.
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Those who can code create companies that are ranked #5, #280, and #4 by market cap, while Steve Jobs creates #1. Good point.
Steve Jobs could code, and he did. He preferred not to, though.
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How much can one learn? (Score:2)
I'm sure many years later she completely forgot about
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Edison Exemplar (Score:2)
Thos. Edison was an archetype of the innovative entrepreneur, and he was not a "idea person". He was a relentless prototyper, experimenter and learner.
Learning by doing is essential. Ideas have to be generated, tried and qualified (and mostly rejected) by doing, not just thinking.
That's the truth, and it sux. (Score:3, Insightful)
Waste so many years? (Score:2)
"Why waste so many years learning how to code?"
Okay... but then again, why waste so many years in college in the first place, for that matter? If you're actually talented at coding, then you can probably learn more on-the-job then you ever will in a classroom.
(And yes... I speak from experience.)
Like putting Marketing in charge... (Score:2)
Here's an age old adage for the outdated generation: "If you want something done right, you do it yourself." I don't think I truly understood its meaning until fairly recently. If you really do have a clear vision for something, that automatically makes you the best candidate to bring it about.
All of this talk about the "Idea person" reminds me of when I was working in the electronics department at Sears, and the pompous district manager who had never worked the front line insisted we implement his 'brillia
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Unfortunately, far too many people are worshipping at the church of Steve Jobs for the concept of the unskilled idea person to die out any time soon.
I'll tell you something about "unskilled" Steve Jobs: When Apple had all their plans ready for the Apple 1 computer, Steve Jobs got off his arse and sold 50 of those computers to a hobby computer store for $500 each, and the $25,000 he got was enough to buy the parts for the first 50 computers he needed to deliver, plus 50 more that he could sell. Without that money, Apple would have been dead at inception. That single sale started everything.
Job's ideas were a dime a dozen. His ability to make it stick
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Unfortunately, far too many people are worshipping at the church of Steve Jobs for the concept of the unskilled idea person to die out any time soon.
The PTB have also put this idea into the larger culture as a way to justify their disproportionate wealth.
When they get rude (Score:3)
When people hear that I can program apps I often get hassled by someone who of course has the next multi million dollar idea. I'm not interested but they rarely take no for an answer.
I've said directly to people that if I'm smart enough and disciplined enough to actually build an app chances are I'm smart enough to have 5 ideas better than theirs and if they really were smart then I'd be happy to recommend a book. People think there is some idea shortage out there. I like asking them about their "spec" because they almost never have anything but vague bar room banter and haven't even thought that out particularly well.
Reading makes their lips tired and no one ever takes me up on the book recommendation. Most apps pitched are already out or are outside the physical abilities of the phone.
Maybe it's because I'm a bitter old man but I love showing them the app they just described and watching their little hearts break.
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When people hear that I can program apps I often get hassled by someone who of course has the next multi million dollar idea.
Whenever someone finds out that I'm a writer, they ask why I haven't written a screenplay and make an easy $50,000 per screenplay. First, it's not that easy to write a screenplay. Second, I don't have connections with Hollywood because I don't live there. Third, I'm not interested in competing with every failed actor or actress who write screenplays when they're not working at the local dinner. No one is happy with that answer.
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When people hear that I can program apps I often get hassled by someone who of course has the next multi million dollar idea. I'm not interested but they rarely take no for an answer.
The variant I love is when they want you to evaluate their idea, but they're so cagey about actually _telling_ you the idea that there's no plausible statement you could make about it. I suspect this is all very highly correlated - if you don't know what you're doing and have never seen how hard it is to actually make working products, you don't know whether other people could run with your idea or not. But if you know how hard it is to accomplish something, you know that telling someone else about your i
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Had this happen to me - I have an idea for the next app - I'll tell it to you, you build it, and you can have 1/2 the cash. My response? Consider: Someone approaches Steven King. Tells them they have a brilliant idea for a book - all he has to do is write it, and he can keep 1/2 of money. I'm betting Mr. King has a very full well (or 2, or 3) of the bodies of people like that.
If, on the other hand, someone approaches me, with desing notes, screen sketches etc of what they want built, I can give them an es
Yes (Score:3)
This is a good idea; a deeper understanding of the various roles around you can only improve your own work.
Similarly, coders should be able to:
Specialized skills are substantially enhanced by a broader understanding of the organization as a whole.
Spoken like a true Capitalist (Score:2)
"Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?"
Yeah, I mean why learn a skill yourself when you can just hire someone to do the work for you and then hire someone else to market the product to make you millions, while paying the guys you hired as little as possible? It seems the most important skill is being able to pay people while keeping most of the money for yourself.
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It seems the most important skill is being able to pay people while keeping most of the money for yourself.
If you ever own a business, you will understand how important that skill is.
fundraising (Score:2)
Just being an "idea" person is useless. Ideas are a dime a dozen. What most people are missing in this exchange is the part about "getting other people to build it for you." That's very non-trivial, and requires it's own skill set. Anyone who has actually tried to start a company knows that getting investment and creating a team is difficult. Most people in the "investor class" don't know or don't remember what it's like to not hang out with other wealthy people looking for investments.
You really need
Years? (Score:2)
Why is it taking people "years" to "learn to code"? That's the part that seems wasteful. You don't need to be a "computer scientist" to write useful code.
I thought it was obvious (Score:2)
If your project involves code, it's better if you are familiar with code. In the same way that if your project involves wood, it's better if you are familiar with woodworking.
Better architects also know the technical aspect of construction, including manual labor.
"Idea person" == too much money, few brains (Score:2)
The Middle Ages nobility: Read? Why would I learn that - I have clerks for that. The only proper thing for someone noble is to hunt and fight.
Mid-20th century: managers and execs don't touch a keyboard, that's what the all-woman secretarial pool is for.
Now: learning to actually do work and make things? That's beneath us, we just buy people to do that, they don't do anything useful (i.e., make money for me), it all comes from my Vision!
mark
A byte by any other name (Score:2)
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I wouldn't knock this guy... he's been on both sides, obviously. Its a valuable perspective
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In the non-cyber world: would a car designer without automotive engineering get anywhere?
I had a roommate who studied automotive design on the West Coast because he loved cars. Four years of college and $25,000 in student debt later, his regular job was logistics in a warehouse. I'm surprised no one told him that an automotive designer was overqualified to work in a warehouse.
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If being rich is your only measure of success than Bernie Madoff is a big success. How ironic you end your rant with the name Jesus since he was, by all accounts, a total failure dying penniless on the cross.
This is America; success is measured in dollars. Bernie Madoff was a success, until he turned himself in to the authorities. Modern Americans would step over Jesus and tell him to get a job.