Doctor: You seem to be in good health, what again did you say you need me to do?
BizBrah: Well, I'd like to be several inches taller, and have four arms.
Doctor: I don't really, uh, do that sort of thing, if it were even possible.
BizBrah: Listen, this is a one in a million idea, I just need someone to implement it. I'm the idea guy, you're the doctor.
Doctor: It's not impossible per se, but none of my colleagues would actually attempt such things on a human subject. Perhaps you should read up a bit about the current state of medical science, and maybe become a doctor if body modification research is your calling.
BizBrah: I looked at what's available at the pharmacy, but it's all too hard to understand. I love tall people. I love the dynamic nature of juggling many things at once. Am I forever cursed to be uninvolved in the medical community because doctors keep shooting down my ideas?
Doctor: ...
BizBrah glares demandingly.
Doctor: Actually, I can help you out! The kind of doctor you're looking for is called a psychiatrist. I know a good one, here's his card.
BizBrah: Bingo! I'm a people person, persuasion is my strength.
Having been on the dev side of the conversation with many (mostly MBA students), I can agree with you here. However, this is only one suits v. nerds issue.
Often, I can see that the idea will be large-impact, but the job itself is boring. Sometimes, it's even a simple CRUD app you could Build in a Weekend* but hmm... what I'm doing now is quite exciting so.. "I'll pass. Btw, if you learn Rails, you could build it in a week or two yourself".I can see why this gets people angry. But it's the way demand-driven markets work.
The other side to the coin is that if you knew a little about programming, you could make your project (at least sound) a lot more interesting. (It's a CRUD app, but it needs to be always consistent, and we're trying to offer a zero-downtime service with queues for when the data store goes down, yada yada).
This is a flawed comparison because you do not need to "become a doctor" or read up on medical science to know that there is currently no way to get another pair of functioning human arms on top of the two you already have.
By the way, there are surgical options to grow taller by lengthening the limbs [1]. I'm not a doctor.
Thanks for the reply zipop I really appreciate the other perspective. That said, you said some things in your response that make me think that the way I wrote my post may have lead you to misinterpret the point I was trying to make. Sorry about that, let me try to rephrase slightly.
To be clear: I know how tough it is to teach yourself how to code. When I was teaching myself as a kid there was no StackOverflow, no Code Academy, and no W3Schools. It was just me and my programming book, and either I figured out the problem for myself or I had to give up. It was really hard.
The point I was trying to make wasn't that you could become a master engineer in 6 months. That's absolutely untrue. The point I was trying to make is that you can teach yourself enough code in 6 months to build SOMETHING, to move yourself along far enough to get to the next level.
I know this is possible because I've seen people do it. One of my best friends from school went from not knowing a how to write a single line of code to being the lead technical founder on a YC company in less than a year.
The real point here is that it's very easy to tell yourself something is too hard, and that you don't have enough time to learn it when that's really just a personal constraint. The point is that it's easy to get distracted doing things with short term rewards (going to events) rather than doing things with rewards that are played out over the long term (building skill). It's more written as a way to shift perspective than anything else. Again thanks for the response, hopefully that cleared it up a little bit.
I read it as coding just being a particular example. The argument works equally well for a pure-tech founder who needs to pick up some marketing to take his project to the next level.
Not everybody can learn to code -- even "basic" stuff like a blog -- even though the tools now are better than ever.*
More importantly, not everyone should learn to code. Some people who teach themselves do so very poorly, then cause more trouble than if they had just left it up to someone who is better at it in the first place.
* - This is always true at any point in history, so it's a pretty meaningless point.
"You can teach yourself enough code in 6 months to build SOMETHING, to move yourself along far enough to get to the next level."
What is "the next level" in this case, though? Is the idea that if you can slap together a proof of concept it will be easier to find more experienced coders, and then you can stop learning to code and go back to being a non-technical partner? Or is the idea to continue coding after the six months? Because the latter seems like a bad idea to me - if someone doesn't want to code, and they have other skills which coders may not have, it makes more sense for them to focus on these other skills; if learning to code helps them get to a place where they can use their non-coding skills, fine.
I'm a developer with extensive experience in building technology solutions and scaling them at all levels, from Fortune 500 all the way down to hobby game (400,000 lines of C / Lua) with a couple of thousand users running on a single PC. I love all aspects of building up a platform and can't get enough of it.
I'm drawn to the idea of being a technical co-founder and even have the financial resources to take a calculated risk on equity over initial income for a good amount of time. I don't live in CA, don't particularly want to move, and really struggle with these online "find a co-founder" sites when it's so hit and miss.
I feel like I have decent business sense but would prefer to spend my time building rather than dealing with VCs and fund raising and board meetings and paperwork so I just focus on small sites making "pocket money" and let the bigger opportunities pass by.
I guess my point in all this is that it isn't just "none technical co-founders" struggling here. This whole area of "partner discovery" is still wide open for someone to come along and find a better way to do things. Do any of the VC companies themselves do any kind of "partnering up"? If finding a technical co-founder is a challenge for so many people then perhaps there's a way for would-be leaders on the technical side to make themselves known to VCs up front, complete whatever interviews were necessary and let the VCs (or another 3rd party) do the matchmaking at a deeper level than just filling in forms on a site? Definitely open to suggestions in the meantime...
I agree the problem is still open. It's a very difficult problem. Partners have to trust each other. It is hard to build that kind of trust ethereally, and startups, by definition, don't have the capital to have people travel around "dating".
Solving that problem would certainly open many doors, and not just in the startup world.
I had never touched programming before. I read the whole book, and did the lessons, but C++ was just too hard for a beginner.
Then I found QBASIC sitting on my computer. QBASIC was easy, it was idiot proof. I learned all the basics (pun) of programming in 1 day. The problem is not that programming is hard, it is that these days there is no easy starting point. To an experienced developer, Javascript might seem easy, but after trying to teach it to my brother for the past few months, you can see how complex it really is for beginners. He took every course at Code Academy and is still struggling.
How much of programming potential is innate? Is saying "I'm not built to be a coder" more like saying "I'm not built to learn a foreign language" (which is implausible and smacks of laziness if you're at least moderately intelligent), or more like "I'm not built to be six feet tall" (which is true for most of the world's population)? I'm interested in the truth here, not in just-so answers based on personal experience. Are there good scientific studies answering this question, and do they agree? And if programming potential is mostly innate, is there a simple test for it that doesn't take 6 months?
I'm repeatedly surprised by how often good coders take their skillsets for granted, as something everyone could learn in a short time if they set their mind to it. They think that just because computers make intuitive sense to them, and they can learn any new programming language or paradigm in a few weeks, a newbie could do the same -- albeit in a matter of months, perhaps. They learned their most important skills from toodling around on the internet, or deconstructing simple machines or programs or something, and they think that this means you don't need formal training, it can come to anyone with time.
The thing is, I don't think people appreciate how much of a deep skill thinking logically is. It's not something you can pick up in a weekend: there is a monstrous gap between the basic common sense appreciation of cause and effect that nearly everyone attains in their lifetime, and the rigorous analytic mind that can look at a series of instructions and deduce all possible outcomes. This is a skill that doesn't require formal training, yes, but it is a skill that must be mastered, with all its requisite 10,000 hours of training beforehand. The best programmers have all been doing this for years, deconstructing the world and its workings whenever they can, and learning the mechanical structure behind their every experience. This training has given them a unique mastery, and while it's not for me to say whether this skill is fundamentally innate or purely a result of practice, it certainly takes years to develop the right modes of thinking. All I can say is that mastery the ability to think logically is a prerequisite for programming in any deep sense, and not everyone has this skill. This is why when I ask my mathematician and physicist friends to look at a program, they can decipher it in minutes even if they don't consider it particularly gripping, while if I ask my writer and even medically trained friends they blankly stare at a wall of gibberish.
Sorry if this answer is more anecdotal than you are asking for, but in my experience there is a fundamental skill in programming that must be mastered that many programmers take for granted, and you can't expect people without it to pick up deep programming in a reasonable amount of time. That's not to say there's no useful place in a place with colleagues for someone who can't really synthesize new bulletproof code, especially in this age of Google and StackOverflow, but the kind of skill people need to whip up a prototype of a novel application on their own without outside assistance takes years. I think Zed Shaw is right in his response to this blog post, if you really are a "people person" than perhaps coming to a programmer with a completely thought-through user experience designed out matches your skillset better, and it's every bit as valuable to the final product as programming knowledge.
The limiting factor for people isn't some innate attribute, it's time.
You need x amount of time coding, debugging, refactoring before you can call yourself a programming 'expert'. This is time that could have been spent learning some other skill like how to cook, how to fly a jet, how to bungee jump while flying a jet, etc.
The real question is, how much time is the person willing or able to invest in learning how to program?
You don't think that some people are simply better suited to tasks that require a high degree of logic than others? Really? I would think that day to day interactions would teach you that much... We're not all born as blank slates with near unlimited potential.
I don't think the message us technical guys are trying to get across is that you need to become one of us and strive for the full ability to implement your idea all by yourself. Hell, the less people that are awesome programmers the better, keeps us in high demand.
After my experience with a very-non-technical co-founder before, I dont think I would ever again agree to work with someone who couldn't at the very least know how to read the source code and manually tweak database entries. Working with someone who has read the basic rails tutorials makes it infinitely easier to communicate and mutually understand technical and temporal restrictions on a product in development.
I'm a programmer, but I sure as hell read Inbound.org, dribbble, forrst, and other sites besides just technically oriented ones so I at the very least can use the same vocabulary to describe and understand what a a partner is doing and why they're choosing to do it that way. I expect anyone I work with to be similarly versed.
I think you make some valid points, and as somebody who self-taught, I get the pain. That being said, I also agree with the common sentiment here "help yourself a little first".
If you consider yourself a technology company, you need an understanding of your technology and what goes into making it. You may not be a master at each part, but you need _something_. It doesn't mean you are not marketing, but like marketing a technology implementation has several nuances that can't be overlooked. Tension always arises when these aren't well understood. Times this problem by 10 if you want "magic" / algorithms which little concept of how they will work (note: you don't need computing studies to figure this out, generally).
Note that I said 'consider yourself a technology company'. There are many companies based on technology that are not, themselves, technology companies (you can argue either way whether this is the right model, but it works). From my experience, these are the companies hunting less for technical co-founders (and who have less excuse for no traction pre product).
If you have a great idea, and the value you bring to the table in executing it is "sales", start by selling it to a developer. I'm not sure what we're arguing about here.
I'm a business student and I feel ashamed the rise of non-technical people in the startup field acting like they've got incredibly valuable skills. I learned more in introductory compsci classes than all the BS in my business classes combined.
In regards to startups, technical people are so much more valuable than non-technical people. Non-technical people keep on perpetuating this: http://whartoniteseekscodemonkey.tumblr.com/ -esque mentality by saying things like this:
>"I am the nontechnical founder of several great startup ideas (I didn’t say startups) sometimes very poorly executed."
The founder of an idea? That doesn't mean much in my mind (then again, I don't know much about the author at all, nor could I did up much). Execution is key to a startup - and technical people are largely the ones that get the important shit done.
Non-technical people can add value for sure - but I think only a small margin of them have valuable skills that rival technical talent in a startup setting.
I think it's a mistake to equate all "non technical people" as "idea people" which is what I seem to be reading in your post. There are people who are just "idea people" who have no particular skills in terms of technology OR business.
But real "business people* provide a TON of value. Someone who understands marketing, distribution, sales, fundraising and all of those things? Tremendously valuable to startups (at least some classes of startups). Find me somebody who can construct and execute a solid marketing strategy, craft a good "core story", do market research, develop solid positioning, and who understands PR and how to get stories placed, someone with an extensive personal contacts list which includes the kind of customers you're looking for, someone who understands the fundraising process and has connections with investors, someone who can cold call a customer, get a meeting, make a presentation and close a sale.... find me that person and I'll offer them a significant equity stake in my startup, to join up as a non-technical co-founder, even if they've never written a line of code in their life, and have no interest in doing so.
Using your own example, you don't go to newly graduated doctors and say, "I have this great idea for a general practice. Let's open a shop together split it 50/50."
I think Dan's point is that if you believe strongly enough in your idea, then it ought to be worth the time investment required to personally execute it. At the very least, take it to a level advanced enough to be able to sell the concept (and yourself) to prospective partners/employees and get them excited.
If you don't think you have the aptitude to learn the nuts and bolts of the particular execution, then you should probably refocus on another idea for which you are qualified. Alternatively, you could try and convince someone else to execute your idea and hope that he or she takes you along for the ride.
To be a programmer is non-trivial and takes skills and learning. To understand the basics of web development is not. There are too many half cooked coders out there without necessary skill or education to properly engineer complex solutions. That do not mean you can't dabble with coding and still not be a programmer, just like I can dabble with painting - need not be Picasso. That is why specialities exist.
While I can't empathize with you because I am a programmer, I feel like PHP isn't a great language to start on simply due to the fact that you have to coordinate a lot of non-programming things (servers, remote editing, HTML/CSS, etc.). I think you'd be more successful starting with Python or something else with a REPL.
PHP might be easier to learn on now than it was for me 8 years ago, I don't really know.
Start with Scheme as your language and SICP and/or The Little Schemer as your instruction books.
A smart person can become a competent coder if there is as little friction as possible between him and "holy shit, this actually works, aren't I awesome?"
When you're ready to try more practical stuff, then it's time to dip your toes into Python.
You have made five comments on Hacker News. Three of them are extremely rude and vulgar (the language doesn't bother me, but the sentiment behind it does). The norm here is civil, intelligent conversation, which is the opposite of "It's because you're a fucking idiot." If you keep going this way, you're going to get hellbanned. Just a friendly heads-up.
[+] [-] mindslight|13 years ago|reply
BizBrah: Well, I'd like to be several inches taller, and have four arms.
Doctor: I don't really, uh, do that sort of thing, if it were even possible.
BizBrah: Listen, this is a one in a million idea, I just need someone to implement it. I'm the idea guy, you're the doctor.
Doctor: It's not impossible per se, but none of my colleagues would actually attempt such things on a human subject. Perhaps you should read up a bit about the current state of medical science, and maybe become a doctor if body modification research is your calling.
BizBrah: I looked at what's available at the pharmacy, but it's all too hard to understand. I love tall people. I love the dynamic nature of juggling many things at once. Am I forever cursed to be uninvolved in the medical community because doctors keep shooting down my ideas?
Doctor: ...
BizBrah glares demandingly.
Doctor: Actually, I can help you out! The kind of doctor you're looking for is called a psychiatrist. I know a good one, here's his card.
BizBrah: Bingo! I'm a people person, persuasion is my strength.
[+] [-] kulkarnic|13 years ago|reply
Often, I can see that the idea will be large-impact, but the job itself is boring. Sometimes, it's even a simple CRUD app you could Build in a Weekend* but hmm... what I'm doing now is quite exciting so.. "I'll pass. Btw, if you learn Rails, you could build it in a week or two yourself".I can see why this gets people angry. But it's the way demand-driven markets work.
The other side to the coin is that if you knew a little about programming, you could make your project (at least sound) a lot more interesting. (It's a CRUD app, but it needs to be always consistent, and we're trying to offer a zero-downtime service with queues for when the data store goes down, yada yada).
[+] [-] beezee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitsune_|13 years ago|reply
By the way, there are surgical options to grow taller by lengthening the limbs [1]. I'm not a doctor.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Health/york-man-grows-inches-surgery/s...
[+] [-] dshipper|13 years ago|reply
To be clear: I know how tough it is to teach yourself how to code. When I was teaching myself as a kid there was no StackOverflow, no Code Academy, and no W3Schools. It was just me and my programming book, and either I figured out the problem for myself or I had to give up. It was really hard.
The point I was trying to make wasn't that you could become a master engineer in 6 months. That's absolutely untrue. The point I was trying to make is that you can teach yourself enough code in 6 months to build SOMETHING, to move yourself along far enough to get to the next level.
I know this is possible because I've seen people do it. One of my best friends from school went from not knowing a how to write a single line of code to being the lead technical founder on a YC company in less than a year.
The real point here is that it's very easy to tell yourself something is too hard, and that you don't have enough time to learn it when that's really just a personal constraint. The point is that it's easy to get distracted doing things with short term rewards (going to events) rather than doing things with rewards that are played out over the long term (building skill). It's more written as a way to shift perspective than anything else. Again thanks for the response, hopefully that cleared it up a little bit.
EDIT: Original post is here if you missed it: http://danshipper.com/the-now-syndrome
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|13 years ago|reply
More importantly, not everyone should learn to code. Some people who teach themselves do so very poorly, then cause more trouble than if they had just left it up to someone who is better at it in the first place.
* - This is always true at any point in history, so it's a pretty meaningless point.
[+] [-] voyou|13 years ago|reply
What is "the next level" in this case, though? Is the idea that if you can slap together a proof of concept it will be easier to find more experienced coders, and then you can stop learning to code and go back to being a non-technical partner? Or is the idea to continue coding after the six months? Because the latter seems like a bad idea to me - if someone doesn't want to code, and they have other skills which coders may not have, it makes more sense for them to focus on these other skills; if learning to code helps them get to a place where they can use their non-coding skills, fine.
[+] [-] zipop|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lasher|13 years ago|reply
I'm drawn to the idea of being a technical co-founder and even have the financial resources to take a calculated risk on equity over initial income for a good amount of time. I don't live in CA, don't particularly want to move, and really struggle with these online "find a co-founder" sites when it's so hit and miss.
I feel like I have decent business sense but would prefer to spend my time building rather than dealing with VCs and fund raising and board meetings and paperwork so I just focus on small sites making "pocket money" and let the bigger opportunities pass by.
I guess my point in all this is that it isn't just "none technical co-founders" struggling here. This whole area of "partner discovery" is still wide open for someone to come along and find a better way to do things. Do any of the VC companies themselves do any kind of "partnering up"? If finding a technical co-founder is a challenge for so many people then perhaps there's a way for would-be leaders on the technical side to make themselves known to VCs up front, complete whatever interviews were necessary and let the VCs (or another 3rd party) do the matchmaking at a deeper level than just filling in forms on a site? Definitely open to suggestions in the meantime...
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
Solving that problem would certainly open many doors, and not just in the startup world.
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|13 years ago|reply
I had never touched programming before. I read the whole book, and did the lessons, but C++ was just too hard for a beginner.
Then I found QBASIC sitting on my computer. QBASIC was easy, it was idiot proof. I learned all the basics (pun) of programming in 1 day. The problem is not that programming is hard, it is that these days there is no easy starting point. To an experienced developer, Javascript might seem easy, but after trying to teach it to my brother for the past few months, you can see how complex it really is for beginners. He took every course at Code Academy and is still struggling.
[+] [-] sadga|13 years ago|reply
is way easier than running GORILLAS.BAS
[+] [-] cousin_it|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirclueless|13 years ago|reply
The thing is, I don't think people appreciate how much of a deep skill thinking logically is. It's not something you can pick up in a weekend: there is a monstrous gap between the basic common sense appreciation of cause and effect that nearly everyone attains in their lifetime, and the rigorous analytic mind that can look at a series of instructions and deduce all possible outcomes. This is a skill that doesn't require formal training, yes, but it is a skill that must be mastered, with all its requisite 10,000 hours of training beforehand. The best programmers have all been doing this for years, deconstructing the world and its workings whenever they can, and learning the mechanical structure behind their every experience. This training has given them a unique mastery, and while it's not for me to say whether this skill is fundamentally innate or purely a result of practice, it certainly takes years to develop the right modes of thinking. All I can say is that mastery the ability to think logically is a prerequisite for programming in any deep sense, and not everyone has this skill. This is why when I ask my mathematician and physicist friends to look at a program, they can decipher it in minutes even if they don't consider it particularly gripping, while if I ask my writer and even medically trained friends they blankly stare at a wall of gibberish.
Sorry if this answer is more anecdotal than you are asking for, but in my experience there is a fundamental skill in programming that must be mastered that many programmers take for granted, and you can't expect people without it to pick up deep programming in a reasonable amount of time. That's not to say there's no useful place in a place with colleagues for someone who can't really synthesize new bulletproof code, especially in this age of Google and StackOverflow, but the kind of skill people need to whip up a prototype of a novel application on their own without outside assistance takes years. I think Zed Shaw is right in his response to this blog post, if you really are a "people person" than perhaps coming to a programmer with a completely thought-through user experience designed out matches your skillset better, and it's every bit as valuable to the final product as programming knowledge.
[+] [-] yen223|13 years ago|reply
You need x amount of time coding, debugging, refactoring before you can call yourself a programming 'expert'. This is time that could have been spent learning some other skill like how to cook, how to fly a jet, how to bungee jump while flying a jet, etc.
The real question is, how much time is the person willing or able to invest in learning how to program?
[+] [-] eswangren|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecubed|13 years ago|reply
After my experience with a very-non-technical co-founder before, I dont think I would ever again agree to work with someone who couldn't at the very least know how to read the source code and manually tweak database entries. Working with someone who has read the basic rails tutorials makes it infinitely easier to communicate and mutually understand technical and temporal restrictions on a product in development.
I'm a programmer, but I sure as hell read Inbound.org, dribbble, forrst, and other sites besides just technically oriented ones so I at the very least can use the same vocabulary to describe and understand what a a partner is doing and why they're choosing to do it that way. I expect anyone I work with to be similarly versed.
[+] [-] AlexBlom|13 years ago|reply
If you consider yourself a technology company, you need an understanding of your technology and what goes into making it. You may not be a master at each part, but you need _something_. It doesn't mean you are not marketing, but like marketing a technology implementation has several nuances that can't be overlooked. Tension always arises when these aren't well understood. Times this problem by 10 if you want "magic" / algorithms which little concept of how they will work (note: you don't need computing studies to figure this out, generally).
Note that I said 'consider yourself a technology company'. There are many companies based on technology that are not, themselves, technology companies (you can argue either way whether this is the right model, but it works). From my experience, these are the companies hunting less for technical co-founders (and who have less excuse for no traction pre product).
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdonia|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ganthor|13 years ago|reply
In regards to startups, technical people are so much more valuable than non-technical people. Non-technical people keep on perpetuating this: http://whartoniteseekscodemonkey.tumblr.com/ -esque mentality by saying things like this:
>"I am the nontechnical founder of several great startup ideas (I didn’t say startups) sometimes very poorly executed."
The founder of an idea? That doesn't mean much in my mind (then again, I don't know much about the author at all, nor could I did up much). Execution is key to a startup - and technical people are largely the ones that get the important shit done.
Non-technical people can add value for sure - but I think only a small margin of them have valuable skills that rival technical talent in a startup setting.
[+] [-] mindcrime|13 years ago|reply
But real "business people* provide a TON of value. Someone who understands marketing, distribution, sales, fundraising and all of those things? Tremendously valuable to startups (at least some classes of startups). Find me somebody who can construct and execute a solid marketing strategy, craft a good "core story", do market research, develop solid positioning, and who understands PR and how to get stories placed, someone with an extensive personal contacts list which includes the kind of customers you're looking for, someone who understands the fundraising process and has connections with investors, someone who can cold call a customer, get a meeting, make a presentation and close a sale.... find me that person and I'll offer them a significant equity stake in my startup, to join up as a non-technical co-founder, even if they've never written a line of code in their life, and have no interest in doing so.
[+] [-] hoodwink|13 years ago|reply
I think Dan's point is that if you believe strongly enough in your idea, then it ought to be worth the time investment required to personally execute it. At the very least, take it to a level advanced enough to be able to sell the concept (and yourself) to prospective partners/employees and get them excited.
If you don't think you have the aptitude to learn the nuts and bolts of the particular execution, then you should probably refocus on another idea for which you are qualified. Alternatively, you could try and convince someone else to execute your idea and hope that he or she takes you along for the ride.
[+] [-] anuraj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
PHP might be easier to learn on now than it was for me 8 years ago, I don't really know.
[+] [-] bitwize|13 years ago|reply
Start with Scheme as your language and SICP and/or The Little Schemer as your instruction books.
A smart person can become a competent coder if there is as little friction as possible between him and "holy shit, this actually works, aren't I awesome?"
When you're ready to try more practical stuff, then it's time to dip your toes into Python.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jason3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|13 years ago|reply