Ask HN: What makes coders happy?

The best sort of manager acts like an administrative assistant. When managing creative people like developers, you don't need to "manage" them in order to get them to create; their natural state is creating things, and this only changes when some obstacle gets in the way. A good manager makes sure that obstacles -- needing to get paid, getting approval to travel to a conference, purchasing a new computer, finding people to test code, irritating users with bug reports which are too vague to be useful -- don't intrude on the developer's time.<p>The best thing you can do to make yourself attractive as a non-coding co-founder (short of learning to code) is to say "I'll take care of all the non-coding muck so that you can focus on doing what you do best".

I was very recently in your position.<p>Remember, an idea is worthless. They have people asking them to build things for equity all the time. You have to compete with these people. If you want to attract a tech-cofounder you have to show value. No one is interested in a one-side partnership where they have to do all the work and then give up a large portion of any profits. How are they going to know you can bring anything to table if you have nothing to show?<p>After I had identified a potential pain point and thought up a solution, this (in order) is how I proceeded.<p>I enrolled in a relevant classes (business fashion/intro to entrepreneurship), wrote a business plan/financial statement, figured out the features and how I wanted the app to work, contracted wireframe mockups, raised money from family, hired a lawyer to form a corporation, had the graphic design done, had the front end done.<p>It took a year and $4500 before I finally found my co-founder.<p>All the stuff had to be done anyways and it was stuff I, as a non tech-cofounder could do. After I met my technical co-founder we spent a week transferring knowledge (after working on it for a year, i had a lot to say) and now he is coding away.<p>Also everything took way longer then I expected.

Ok, lots of administrative suggestions here, which is good insight, I appreciate it.<p>What about collaboration and working with developers to incorporate their knowledge of sound programming structure and data architecture into the site? My site looks simple from the front end, but has a ton of stuff happening on the back end of things.<p>Excellent data management will be key for me and its something I need a lot of help with. The front end was easy for me to draw up but I need a great creative relationship with a technical cofounder to make the site as powerful as I'd like it to be.

Do's: Focus your communication, clearly define specifications early on, set list of priorities for tasks, and aim for a minimal amount of meetings. Basic software engineering stuff, but this makes a world of difference. Leave margins for things to go wrong: you'll need them, and your programmers will love you for it.<p>Don't make assumptions about what is easy and difficult to build. Take advantage of the expertise of your team to assess how much time different tasks might take.

Have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. No one likes hitting a moving target. Sure there might be pivots, but don't add to that by not understanding in great detail what you want built.<p>Assist them by helping them test everything you can.

I would definitely recommend learning the basics of some programming language. If anything else this will help you to understand what's going on and what needs to be done to have your vision implemented.

This video might give you some insights: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc</a>