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Comment by runT1ME | Hacker News Reader

PG said it best:

It's almost impossible for a non-technical person to hire a good technical person. You wouldn't even know where to begin.

So yes, MANY web companies are started by non-technical founders, and it progresses like this:

   1. Get seed money
   2. Hire a designer and developer
   3. Build the site
   4. Re-build the site because it didn't work
   5. Fire developer and hire new developer to build site
   6. Struggle to get developer to see your vision
   7. Argument with developer on why he is doing all the work
   8. Developer quits, look for new developer...

etc.

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I think this is a variation of the "should the project manager of a software project understand software" question, which I have thought quite a lot about over the years.

The answer is yes because:

1. As mentioned above, it enables them to hire well

2. They can independently assess effort estimates

3. They can act as a more effective shield between the team and the users/customers/management

4. They can effectively referee technical arguments within the team

5. Problems are best solved not by throwing resources at the problem, but by intelligently rescoping, recasting, or refactoring. You need to understand software to do that. I think this is the most important item on the list.

6. Even sane well-managed projects have "all hands on deck" crunchtimes. The manager of a software project should be able to make themselves useful - if not code, they can debug, beta-test, document, manage releases, etc.

7. People give you their best work when they respect you. Technical people respect people who understand them,.

As Joel Spolsky said:

"Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you're a software company, writing excellent code is how you're going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. If you're a pharmaceutical company, write software for drug research, but don't write your own accounting package. If you're a web accounting service, write your own accounting package, but don't try to create your own magazine ads. If you have customers, never outsource customer service."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

I'm now the technical co-founder of a software company that originally outsourced the development of the software to another firm. To say it was a disaster before I arrived would be an understatement.

In house can still be non-founder full time employees. People seem to be confusing the two.

I think "almost impossible" is too harsh. Hiring a technical person off the street will be very difficult. However, a smart non-technical person should be able make reasonable decisions about people they know (personally or professionally) based on past achievement, other people's recommendations, previous interation, gut feel, ex.

Obviously there will still be false positives, but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically.

If this is true, why does it take so long to hire good programmers? Even startups with technical founders, who have an entire network to draw on, spend spend a lot time searching for and evaluating programmers.

>but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically

Why do you think this? Certainly you have to be smart to graduate from good University, but it's not secret that many programmers out of the University can't code their way out of a paper bag. Unfortunately, I've worked with a fair amount of intelligent people in a technical field who just weren't good at producing high quality software.

I think Postabon was started by MBAs and what they did was read the essay you're talking about, and then go out and hire a Lisp programmer. They appear to be doing well.

Many businesses depend on division of labor, and many are run by non-technical people, and rely on specialized employees to manage mission-critical software and technology. According to PG's logic, this should be impossible.

The real problem is incentives. Developers who are willing to make the necessary commitments and sacrifices, take on the risks and the opportunity costs of building a startup are in a strong enough negotiating position to demand ownership. But this advantage is almost certainly weakening. For example, cloud computing makes it much cheaper to scale, which means performance is less of an issue, so cheaper, less experienced developers with less training become more viable. Even if outsourcing is undesirable for other reasons, it still puts local developers in a weaker position. At some point it will be possible to offshore development of a prototype, get some traction and then rebuild everything once you get funding. I know some startups have been acquired after the acquiring company outsourced a cheap ripoff of almost the same product to see if was a market for it with their customers, and then bought the startup. Why couldn't this also work for coming up with a new idea?

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