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xibernetik | 14 years ago

Semantics. Someone else (Acheron Project) designed and built the submarine. Cameron organized and enabled the endeavor, but the product, the Deepsea Challenger, was not built by him.

You can argue what the words mean, but it's clear what "built" in this context means, and it's not enabling or organizing or funding, it's coming up with the full technical design and implementing it.

Yes, programmers get caught up in thinking they are the gods of business. They aren't. However, (bad) non-technical folk are quick to lose sight of how much their business or ideas are reliant on the technical prowess of someone else. It's not just "writing code" - it's coming up with the overall architecture, understanding how it will scale, being able to come up with something that won't fall apart the moment it gets released to the public. If this was easy, outsourcing would be a lot more common in the field and programmers would not have the sort of pay they do.

Non-technical skills are important. However, technical expertise is the difference between an idea and a product. Both are critical in order to achieve fantastic things. The problem seems to be that there are a lot of non-technical, unproven idea-men and -women who think just because they have people skills, they can fashion this "million dollar idea" into a business... They _just_ need a coder. It's easy to get blind-sided when you're not in a given field, be it the technical folk saying "well that business crap is just fluff" or the non-technical folk thinking just anyone can whip up a killer social app given a month or two.

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