Why Student Programmers Rant about Business Students with “Ideas”

Since the first boom, the number of wildly successful tech companies started solely by engineers far outnumbers those started by business guys, backed up by some engineers. The smart money has followed along, such that the "business" requirements a VC looks for are pretty slim. They no longer care if you have an MBA on the team. Not even a little bit. I know this to be true, because I've talked to a half dozen VCs and a few angels. They don't care that our company is two hackers working out of our houses. They care that we've built something that millions of people use daily.

You need a business plan, sure, but it can be eight pages and mostly charts. Any hacker with a couple hours to kill and a word processor and spreadsheet, a deep understanding of their business and their market, and a couple of example business plans, can make that happen. You need a monetization strategy that makes sense, but business guys are no better equipped to come up with this than the hackers who spend half their time researching the competition and other businesses that work in similar fields (hackers are obsessive compulsive about research, so it comes very naturally). The most successful monetization strategy of the last ten years (context sensitive ads) was created by a nerd.

The stereotypical nerd no longer matches the stereotype. I've seen it at several companies where I've contracted over the years. Older developers (say, 40+) are nerdy in the traditional sense. A little overweight, a little socially inept, a little insecure in meetings except when discussing their particular interests, etc. The younger ones are generally healthier than average, more likely to have hot girlfriends/boyfriends, aggressive enough in meetings to handle even the most boisterous business guy, and full of the confidence that comes only from having a really firm grasp on your subject. It's not always true, but true enough that I feel confident saying it about the majority of great engineers. And, good engineers are no longer broke...they make a lot of money when they want to work for another company. Not MBA money, but they aren't desperate for any crumbs you want to throw their way. If the engineer you're talking to is desperate, he's not a good engineer, or at least, hasn't had the time in the market to establish that he's a good engineer. A BS in computer science has recently become the highest paying four year degree for first-time job seekers.

Business guys can certainly bring things to the table--but a hacker no longer needs one in the roster to raise money or build a successful company. They may hire one later, when the business side of the business is a full-time job.

So, I can understand business guys feeling a bit upset by this turn of events...and they can certainly point to lots of hacker-founded failures that made major business mistakes. But the road of MBA-founded tech startups is also littered with innumerable failures, for many of the same reasons (and a few additional ones, like: failure to deal with technology appropriately).

MBAs are certainly useful. They make a lot of money in established companies for a reason--starting salary for MBAs at Google is higher than for a fresh-out-of school engineer. But a tech startup doesn't NEED an MBA to reach a reasonable level of success. Accept it and move on. Sure, you can still start a tech startup, if you're a "business guy"...but you need a hacker, so you'd better get used to treating them as a partner rather than an employee and someone you can look down on as socially inferior. We've got hotter girlfriends than you, now, you know?

But in all this tech parties I have been, and I keep meeting this "wantreprenours", that are just a "coder" away from getting their startup off the ground, if they only could find a coder.... good luck.

They come across with a douchebag types, with a sense of superiority as they think they know businness better than you, but yet are pretty oblivious on what it takes to get something off the ground. They learn few keywords such as Ajax, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and quite often they hugely undersestimate the effort it takes (development wise) to build something they want, which is very annoying to programmers.

Just go to any 2.0 parties, and you will meet these annoying wankers all the time, with exceptions of course, as not everybody is annoying, or oblivious, but a lot are.

Ps. In college, a lot of the businnes majors were in social frats, which tend to be disliked from academic/smart types. Plus businnes school is not a big deal. A CS major can easily go to MBA and be good at it, will the reverse is very rare. At my CS programm, during the second semester, we had a class that was kinda hard, which weeded out the people that were not capable to handle it, or were there for the wrong reasons (money, as it was the .com boom then). Ah, and a lot of these failed CS majors ended up either in businnes, or "information techonology", which was half businnes. So, there you go, more reasons not to like business types.

The real discussion should be about how to find the right business person for your startup. Here is what I look for: 1> outgoing but pleasant to be around, 2> good listener, 3> cares about technical details, is curious, 4> has a broad range of interests, 5> has geek/hacker friends, 6> can conceptualize a business as a systems problem.

It does take a bit of forward thinking, and that's where I think business students have a slight advantage. Writing code is great, wonderful, and something I love to do. Many business students would say that in the grand scheme of things, it's a useless talent unless it solves some kind of problem. Many techies would say that in the grand scheme of things, it's an incredibly useful talent, as it involves understanding the underlying structure or system. Although my formal education is in business, guess what? I agree 100 percent with the latter; I don't know where people get their stereotypes about MBAs, but there's really no such thing as a "typical" MBA. Most of us are, on some level or another, systems people.

Indeed, one of the more valuable lessons I gained from mine was to stop seeing "problems" and start seeing "opportunities". There have been so many times I've used a search engine to look for something, not found it, and thought 'now _that_ would be a great idea for a business'.

So yeah, it's very true that in business school, we're taught to seek out competitors' weaknesses, and "exploit" those weaknesses. But as every hacker knows, just because you _can_ do something doesn't mean you _should_. And then are there those (the majority) who just don't care: what I find quite humorous is how some people consider themselves "programmers" if they know how to set the TiVo to record 'American Idol.' A little bit funny, b/c the original rant reminds me a lot of a high-school cliche about cliques. Nonetheless, cheers to Mr. Yates for his frank opinions. :)

And becausing aquiring the knowledge to implement the Idea is also a lot harder than the effort needed to aquire an Idea

Finally, I think because people who do and know how to do are so preocupied with the tuff-ness of implementing the Idea they sometimes loose enthusiam and in many way this sometimes ties them down or set them back a little, and it the worry free business student just irritates them

One incident, in particular, drove most of the hatred for my original (and now replaced) rant. It involved an M.B.A. recruiting me to work for “his idea”, promising a bunch of money and a sizable stake in equity (~35%). However, once the boss-employee relationship set in, the money evaporated and the equity shrank to 5%. In the end, I wasted 6 weeks of incredibly hard work and came away with a chip on my shoulder.

The argument doesn’t really have much to do with Hackers and Business types. As he points out, it simply has to do with the fact that in a small group of people (2 or 3), there is no room for pure leaders. At that group size they merely become bullies, and the whole group is less powerful because of it.

I would rather talk about the opposite case: i.e. A hacker has a brilliant technology idea and needs to find a business person with the connections, sales skills, finance skills, channel knowledge (and at least some technical understanding) to make it commercially viable. That seems like a harder problem... your fresh out of college MBA guy might not be the right fit.

I can generally agree with the article, but the old, old stereotypes aren't really helping, are they? I see very few "socially awkward" programmers in my work. They might not be game-show hosts, but they're not Rain Man either. As the author points out in the footnote, if you can master computing arcana, you can pick up the basic ideas around business and accounting fairly quickly.

This is just a long-winded exercise in stereo-typing bordering on bigotry.

Then I calculate what the other side brings into the deal (time/skills/money) and calculate the percentage for which I'd consider working on the project.

Now he should start talking about giving the first step on a date with a girl ...