This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be.<p>Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO.<p>While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need because hacking something together happens to be the first step to creating a great company.<p>The key insight is that no great company was made by only one guy. It takes both great hackers, great marketing people, great CEO's and great sales people. Hell, maybe you even need a great janitor...<p>So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who needs who.
I liked this rant, immature as it might be.<p>Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it.<p>Before I even <i>hear</i> their idea, I do a simple mental calculation.<p>First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition to being a programmer. They better at <i>least</i> match that and have actually worked on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves.<p>The person needs to be as competent in their supposed field as I am in mine. The value that people who are good at selling and networking bring is incalculable, I'd kill for a co-founder that could bring that. But they have to be as crazy and devoted to it as I am towards my coding, or else it just can't work.<p>Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(
What a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of the company.<p>If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:<p>1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital.<p>2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity.<p>If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream.<p>See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere.<p>As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.
This sounds just like a zed shaw rant, in fact I think he says the exact same thing in some article.
For the most part this is usually true (although abrupt), it is often hard to break it to people that their 'awesome idea' really isn't worth anything.
Lots of people are Jacks of All Trades, but masters of none. Take, for example, the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen movie franchise. Everybody had skills and roles to play. It wasn't possible for one person to be in all places all the time, nor was it possible for a single person to perform each job.<p>This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.
Is Hacker News the new slashdot or what? How come this entry made it to the top of the page?
And a note for Erik Peterson: some future day when you discover that you need some help for something you don't quite understand fully, you might regret having written that blog entry.
Someone (aswanson?) posted a question I thought was really good, and was replying to with the following. But when I hit "Add Comment", it seemed the post was deleted in the meantime. I'm going to put my reply up anyway 'cause I spent 5 minutes writing it :)<p>The question was: how did the situation get this way, with creative and knowledgeable people being told what to do by often clueless managers and MBAs, who have no particular expertise? It seems irrational and it's not obvious why the world would work this way.<p>Jerry Weinberg, who was one of the first few computer programmers in the world and later became famous as a writer, was asked this once. He said that the first few generations of programmers (up to 1970 or so) were arrogant towards customers, businesspeople, and managers. Programmers were so scarce, and computing itself so unfamiliar and scary, that programmers expected and were given a kind of godlike deference, which they abused. After a while, customers got angry about the fact that they didn't have a say, were treated like idiots, and given stuff that didn't work very well. Eventually, Weinberg said, this led to a backlash whereby managerial control was imposed on programmers. The effects of this backlash persist today.<p>I don't claim that this is the only answer to the question, but it sounds like a piece of the puzzle, at least in the software business. The thing about the backlash is that it also failed, leading to the irrational situation the original questioner described.<p>Perhaps the current generation of entrepreneur hackers can be seen in this context, as programmers who have creative control, but also really care about building what customers want.
As a non-coder who is cursed with a brain that comes up with a constant flow of creative ideas that my fingers can't execute, you've just shattered my world. Screw you. Oh, and do you mind if I borrow some of your old reference manuals, I just decided to learn how to program. ;-)
The problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs.<p>Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
Ah, and a lot of people mention Jobs as a non-hacker, which is simply not true. He was a hacker, but with great businness sense.<p>"Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14]<p>In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."
Commenters here talk as if no successful business was ever started by a sharp businessperson who hired software developers.<p>Clearly, many such businesses exist.
this presents a rather binary view of things - either you're a hacker or you're an arrogant MBA.<p>there are plenty of people who aren't hackers but they certainly understand tech and aren't beef-headed MBA's. mitch kapor and joe kraus never wrote a line of code.
I think the author has a point, but I think hackers are guilty of similar behavior regarding legal and finance expertise, both of which are critically important in keeping and profiting (respectively) from your hacking. I think it's really just pretty self-evident that people will overvalue their own field of knowledge, and consider other fields to be less important/valuable than they actually are.
This sounds as hysterical as if someone told me, "If you don't know Mandarin, don't do any business with/in China!"<p>Delegation of responsibility is a concept of pivotal importance for any entrepreneur to grasp if they want to go very big. Isn't Richard Branson dyslexic?