'I Just Need a Programmer' 735
theodp writes "As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'"
Ooh ooh! I know this one! (Score:5, Funny)
beer (Score:4, Funny)
I just need a beer...
Re:An idea with ability is a fantasy. (Score:5, Funny)
My words exactly! But whenever I ask for an engineer who has some spare time to build that for me, people start laughing. Odd...
Re:As a programmer (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I try to the be programmer who comes up with the great idea.
Ah, my next great idea: a web text editor for the dyslexic.
Re:As a programmer (Score:5, Funny)
You do realize that you are posting on a website that: a) made its founders a fair chunk of change and b) was first implemented as a disastrous mess of perl spaghetti code.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As a programmer (Score:5, Funny)
If you can reduce c by 5%, you get a Nobel. (Score:5, Funny)
I would have to disagree. The difference between wealth and having a second job isn't in whether you can code the idea. Any 15-year-old idiot can probably code an idea, unless it's very complex. How well you can do it is nearly paramount. You know, for example, that most sort algorithms max out at an efficiency of Clog(n)[element_count], as a rough description. You know who makes six figures a year? The guy who can reduce "C" by five percent. And no, you can't do that with shell scripts and lines of spaghetti code.
c = 299,792,458 metres per second [wikipedia.org] - it's not just a good idea - it's the law. Of course you can't do it with shell scripts. You need at least a Mr. Fusion.
Re:As a programmer (Score:2, Funny)
Goddam it, why do all Slashdot discussions end up discussing the Nazis???