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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> My fiancée was working with a plastic surgeon, Rowan Pritchard Jones, who had also been in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who was thinking about his own medical equivalent of a side-project - writing a book with his colleague, Paul McArthur. They decided to do some form of app instead to make it different, and asked me if I was interested in working with them.

This shows once again that building successful software depends not just on coding skills or UX design skills, but more on the connections we have. I'm betting most senior developers on HN could have come up with this kind of solution (or perhaps even more advanced ones). Connections determine, through a seemingly random process, our ability to actually find interesting stuff to work on. I just wish it was simpler to find interesting project ideas.

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Yeah. To take it a step further - I would argue that for a lot of things, the coding isn’t most difficult part of the innovation process.

> the coding isn’t most difficult part of the innovation process.

This. Exactly my sentiments. I believe coding could also be one of these easiest things to do. Hardest are - requirements gathering and selling.

Funny how everyone thinks other stuff is hard. Me, I think gathering requirements and deciding what to build is the fun part. Following through with the plan, managing the project, coming up with a schedule, making sure everything gets done on time, that's what I consider the hard part.

Great. Then, let's build a team of experts :-)

Both you and the parent seem to assume that there is this clear boundary between gathering requirements, and implementing the solution.

The hard part is accepting that this is an ongoing cycle and that you need to find ways to build inertia and continually evolve the value proposition.

Sorry, I do not have this assumption. Prioritizing the requirements is another big challenge.

A lot of very valuable companies are built around what are little more than CRUD apps, or at least started that way.

Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit started as relatively basic apps, basically glorified message boards.

And evolved into glorified Skinner boxes?

Of course not, it's our own biases that lead us to think we are the gods through the expression of a creative process. Because we are human, and cannot see past what's in front of us, we mistake our tools for creating.

The first steam engines were riveted by metal workers who may have felt similarly.

This is similar to college students who study “consulting” as a discipline. Certainly there are important things to learn about consulting strategies. However, if you aren’t a subject matter expert in the field you are consulting, I don’t want to hear it.

For a lot of consulting disciplines, and management consulting in particular, the only domain expertise you require is repeating back to the customer what they told you and finding a way to manipulate and/or present what they've told you such that it supports the conclusion they would like.

This sounds like sarcasm but I'm pretty sure every management consultant would admit that's what they do.

(technical consultants one hopes are actual domain experts, as you say, though I've often found it to be hit or miss even so).

I've asked a few friends who are management consultants this. Most say around 25-50% of their job is doing that. They don't view this negatively though because in many cases getting a reputable consulting group to tell you what you already know helps the decision actually get implemented. The rest of their time they spend doing things like collecting information that the client can't/doesn't want to do on their own.

Often the point is that there's no single "they". If an organization is sufficiently dysfunctional that group A refuses hear what group B has to say (and many organizations are), then management getting a summary (filtered!) of group B's recommendations from someone they trust is quite valuable.

Great point, completely agree. It took me several years to understand that the quality of the technology is only a single component (often a very minor one) to making a successful product (let alone a successful company).

Connections and a strong network will improve odds of success but there is a lot of great software that has and will be made be people starting at 0 without a fiancé who has doctor friends.

There are a lot of things that might discourage a young hacker and we shouldn’t add “you don’t have a network” to that list.

Maybe a more positive message would be “it shows how building a network along with apps will increase the likelihood of success and certainly the likelihood of making it to the hacker news front page”

And motivation . The exposure to the problem gives you motivation to solve it . If someone randomly gave this idea, one could probably just ignore it ..

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