
So you "just need a hacker", huh? - carpal
http://subwindow.com/articles/11
======
pg
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.

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.

~~~
chaostheory
The link itself maybe an embarrassment, but the discussions surrounding it on
YC are somewhat less emotional and pretty interesting; and they do touch upon
the reasons why it happens (particularly the thread started by mixmax)

~~~
pg
I noticed that too. It's like stone soup. Still, chicken soup would be better.

~~~
derefr
You could take out the stones after the soup gets going--edit the post to be a
self-reference link, rather than an outbound one. That would make it clear
that the post is not valued, but the discussion is.

------
mixmax
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.

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.

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...

So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who
needs who.

~~~
jmtulloss
Sure I need a brilliant CEO, brilliant marketing guy, etc, etc. But first I
need a great product. I'm going to make that, not the other guys.

~~~
tom_rath
You wouldn't start coding something before you'd fleshed out a design, right?
So why would you start designing something before you identified the market
for it?

Marketing is the social component of design, and you need brilliant marketing
before you can create that brilliant product.

~~~
cstejerean
Not start coding before you fleshed out the design? Not design until you've
identified a market? Sounds like a recipe for never getting anything done.
That might be the proper way to tackle things when you have a big upfront
costs, but generally for software you can just start coding on things you find
useful and interesting. If others are interested, great, you've got a company.
If not you just have a useful product and then you can move onto something
else.

~~~
tom_rath
How can you create a useful product if you haven't identified the use?

~~~
chaostheory
luck in combination with the Max Strategy (continually trying different things
all the time):

a lot of products did not identify their use before hand, or their real use
was discovered accidentally after they were made.

post it notes - started as a failed adhesive. a coworker found that it worked
well using it with paper and a gospel hymn book

snood - (a very popular puzzle bobble variant) the programmer made it because
he was bored in grad school

linux - started as a hobby by a bored phd candidate

silly putty - a failed rubber substitute designed for WWII use

the list goes on...

~~~
astrec
Perhaps better stated that a lot of products did not identify their eventual
use beforehand. For your list the seed product had some utility:

* adhesive gives rise to postit * rubber alternative gives rise to silly putty * pedagogic device gives rise to game, kernel

~~~
chaostheory
"the seed product had some utility"

for some of the seed products their makers intended for them to have utility,
but they didn't - that's why they were initial failures...

------
dangrover
I liked this rant, immature as it might be.

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.

Before I even _hear_ their idea, I do a simple mental calculation.

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 _least_ match that and have actually worked
on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves.

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.

Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(

~~~
tim2
Send them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate.
Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.

~~~
SwellJoe
I wouldn't work for rates "competitive" with those at eLance or Rent-A-Coder.
I've done projects through those sites, and despite explicitly stating, "Don't
bother with lowball offers--we're looking for good work, not low prices. We
are developers, and we will be judging your experience and code harshly." I
still got bids of 150 bucks for a project that I would have billed a weeks
worth of hours for. They, of course, would do a horrible job, and not even
worth that much...but you shouldn't try to compete on price with those folks.

~~~
tim2
In theory, but we're talking about guys who think that you love programming so
much that you'll just work for some of their worthless equity.

~~~
SwellJoe
True. Asking any amount is probably enough to weed out the folks who think
hackers are inter-changeable and completely devoid of business ideas or
acumen. Of course, you can also just say, "No thanks, I'm working on my own
idea for the time being. Best of luck to you, though." That's what I do.

~~~
tim2
My strategy has always entertained me because the guys I've known were so
thrilled about their rediculous "world changing" idea that they were crushed
to find that hardly any outsourcers were even interested:)

Yours will work well enough, but I also like to test to see if anyone is
actually determined enough to go through all this trouble and carry out their
plan anyway. Serious entrepreneurs are very few in this part of the country...

------
ardit33
What a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of
the company.

If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:

1\. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs
money, i.e. capital.

2\. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it
with little pay, or only equity.

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.

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.

As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers,
and not businness types.

------
ejs
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.

~~~
carpal
Pretty much any solid rant sounds like a Zed Shaw rant.

------
ten-seven
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.

This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player.
Attitude will take you only so far.

~~~
timr
Yeah. It also wasn't possible to knock out all of the power in Las Vegas with
an EMP bomb, to lift a mansion covertly with a 12-man team in one night, or to
"hack" into a casino's "security system" by clipping little tiny things to a
few network cables.

That's because those were _movies_.

------
frouaix
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.

------
gruseom
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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

------
TrevorJ
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. ;-)

------
mynameishere
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.

Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--

~~~
carpal
There are two main differences:

1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to
aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups
don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the
Enterprise cookie).

2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than
they are now.

~~~
carpal
I went a bit more in-depth here:

<http://subwindow.com/articles/12>

It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.

------
ardit33
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.

"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]

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."

------
alex_c
I can't help but wonder whether this was inspired by the Facebook dev forums.

------
tptacek
Commenters here talk as if no successful business was ever started by a sharp
businessperson who hired software developers.

Clearly, many such businesses exist.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I know of businesses who look like they were started by businesspeople who
hired hackers because the hackers were later ousted (like digg). The
businessperson displaced the hacker after the fact. Can you think of any
businesses were there where this clearly didn't happen? Can you think you any
successful software company started by a businessperson who paid consulting
fees to thoughtworks or IBM, set up a booth at a CS department to recruit
techies, or paid a headhunter?

~~~
tptacek
Amazon.

~~~
tptacek
Also, Intuit.

~~~
tptacek
And, Wikipedia. And YouTube. Can Dick Costello code? I can't remember (he's a
really nice guy, though). No? Feedburner.

~~~
nostrademons
Jeff Bezos was a hacker. He didn't _call_ himself one because he also had
significant business & financial skills, but he worked as a quant for D.E.
Shaw. D.E. Shaw is the Google of hedge funds; anyone there is more than a
match for the Ph.Ds at Google. Bezos's degree was in EECS, and his childhood
projects would easily have gotten him into YCombinator.

Intuit was cofounded by Tom Proulx, who wrote the first version of Quicken
himself. Scott Cook gets most of the credit because of his determination, but
without either of them, the company wouldn't exist. It certainly was not an
outsourced startup.

Wikipedia I'll grant you. Though the concept of wikis was invented by Ward
Cunningham, who certainly was a hacker.

YouTube was started by 3 ex-PayPal employees. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were
certainly hackers, Chad Hurley was more design. They built the initial version
themselves.

~~~
tptacek
Hurley was CEO, and received more shares than the other two founders. YouTube
was founded with Hurley's money.

We can argue about the other two; I feel like I'll lose Intuit but win Amazon,
but who knows. Not worth it. I think my point stands.

------
Harj
this presents a rather binary view of things - either you're a hacker or
you're an arrogant MBA.

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.

------
admoin
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.

------
joeter
This sounds as hysterical as if someone told me, "If you don't know Mandarin,
don't do any business with/in China!"

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?

------
run4yourlives
Sounds as young as he looks.

My advice: Never pass up a good opportunity.

------
edw519
I sure hope he doesn't need as many lines of code to build something as he
needs cuss words to make a point.

------
Tichy
Stuff like that makes me wonder if I should start a "Never ever work with that
person, no matter what"-list.

------
earle
stubborn

~~~
earle
the immediate downmods of my original comment of "stubborn" seems to be
further testament to the overall quality in capacity for this site lately.

the authors comments are emotionally loaded opinions that are quite frankly, a
result of immaturity and frustration.

so my original comment stands:

stubborn.

~~~
davidw
It was not a great comment, but I'd also like to say that we've had, if not
quite a tradition... many of us have encouraged people not to downvote beyond
-1 or 0 for comments that are not "really bad" (racist, outright insults,
spam, that kind of thing).

------
brk
Brilliant!

------
Tichy
Ruby book: 30$ - Rails book: 30$ - Never have to work with arrogant hackers
again: priceless!

