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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> Particularly if you have a strategist who thinks his job is just to dream up profitable models, he ends up carving that role out in a way that's detrimental to the rest of the team.

My god, this. These people make me bonkers. Especially because I feel like I have a bit of this tendency myself, the desire just to think big thoughts and do no actual work. Happily, I long ago learned that ideas were approximately worthless without labor, and that I anyway had much better ideas when laboring because it forced me to engage with the details.

And yes, those people can poison a team. My best working experiences have all been with people who a) all valued actual work and b) believed that everybody could have good ideas.

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"I'm the idea guy" out of someone's mouth is the stark red-flag warning that their net contribution is 0.

Ideas are so cheap and easy.

Implementation is a long hard road. And where you learn your idea was vague enough that it had almost no value. And only through painstaking iteration can you turn it into something with value.

> Ideas are so cheap and easy.

I doubt this.

It is true however.

Consider it was easy to bring an idea in this world, and the hard part was the initial first thought; writing a paper/article painstakingly rigorously would be unnecessary. Writing a book would be a breeze and no author would ever go through more than a single draft. The idea was born beforehand, was complete correct and perfect, so putting everything down with words is just a matter of transcribing. An organization would not usually hire engineers with multiple degrees, but simply writers or an automated system that would listen and transcribe the idea.

An idea is truly born and exists through a lot of effort and iteration and redefinement and refinement.

P.S. There is a hard and subjective issue of where the line is drawn between ideation and minor uninteresting and menial maintainance/get the money in the bank work.

We have to recall however that a parent brings their child to life and tags along through all the effort and work. A child is the result of years of high to low level of unpleasant work. Drawing an arbitrary line of when you shall stop giving as a parent is naive and egotistical.

Very true. I think I recently deliberated on this point about ideas being cheap because they can so deceptively sit in the realm of the ideal where everything is unconstrained and unchallenged. Grounding ideas and putting them to the test is where you begin to discover all the boundaries and tradeoffs and messy details that must be sorted through. Real work has a way of illuminating all those sticky messy points that must line up first for an idea to have a legging in the real world. Our imaginations are free to come up with all sorts of inconsistent and conflicting ideas that just never come to the foreground because of the centration on the beautiful perfect idea.

The best way I've heard this described is... Imagine the best painting you can come up with or have ever seen. Now go paint it.

What, if your ability for imagination is lacking? What, if this would be true in general? What do these implementers actually implement then?

I also think, I have another definition of 'idea' than most people here. It is common especially in software development, to see the way as the destination and incremental change as development caused by some magical good-ending evolutionary process. This includes a quite unsubstantiated belief in getting the right ideas automagically along the way.

You need both things. A good idea does not descent from heaven. Also, it has history in the person, creating it. This history is hard work in its own, inner fighting against the common and the environment. Jumping out of the box, all these pure implementers are unable to do.

I am working for 25 years in the industry. I have written real code from the beginning. But I am also a mathematician and can say I had a few good ideas along the way. I am proud of it.

What's the market price for an idea?

If it's greater than zero, let me know. I have notebooks full of them. Business ideas. Project ideas. Political ideas. Social ideas. I generally can't give 'em away, much less sell them. Why? Everybody has their own ideas, and they like 'em better. And the ones in my notebooks don't have what really matters: validation.

I’m interested, do you have a blog?

Not really! I have an old personal website, but I'm most active on Twitter, where you can find me as williampietri. Thanks for asking.

"Pure" ideas are cheap and easy; good ideas require a very thorough knowledge of implementation which is usually achieved through experience

Right, and to add upon this - that's because all ideas originate from the senses.

To demonstrate: try to imagine a new color you've never seen before that's not in any way associated to any of the colors that you've seen. (it's impossible)

Or think of it this way: You could explain a car to someone who has never seen a car before, but only so long as the ideas used to explain the idea of a car (e.g. wheels, doors, windows), have already been familiarized to the other person. Otherwise if those ideas weren't familiar, such as a wheel, you'd need to also explain what a wheel is. And if the concepts used to explain the wheel wasn't familiar (and so on), you'd eventually hit a point where you must expose the idea(s) directly to their senses (eg show them), otherwise they will never understand what you're talking about.

So all ideas come from the senses, and your minds ability to combine these "pure" ideas that you've sensed. "Pure" ideas are cheap and easy because they're the simplest ideas - they're what you directly sensed. To have good ideas, you need to combine many "pure" ideas together, hence why those who have experience working closely and thoroughly with something, will often have the best ideas associated to that something...

http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

They're a dime a dozen(and that's a generous appraisal).

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMyIdea/

Or even negative. I've seen situations where the idea person is so busy being Mr. Toad that everyone around them is regularly scrambling to clean up messes and it ends up being a constant distraction from actually pushing projects through to completion.

Yes I agree, idea guys are bad, but I’d like to make a contrast between two words that are often thought of as synonymous. There’s the ‘idea’ guy and a man/woman with ‘vision’. The difference between these two is that someone with a vision enables others to see and feel what they see and feel about the future of a project in a manner that produces action on everybody’s part. The visionary man/woman would act in accordance with their vision, because there end goal is to create and/or share something truly valuable to others. I could think of a couple of people with visions many of them startup founders: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, and Sam Altman. Visionary man/woman take risks on their vision and put their plans into action. Sometimes they’re the business manager, or the scientist, and at other times the engineer, but in some way shape or form they lead others toward a goal through their tremendous clarity in their own and other’s collective vision.

It's similar to the expression I hear frequently at my company--"I don't have all the answers, but I have all the questions".

True, Ideas are easy but that does not mean they are next to worthless.

Idea people that just blurb out thoughts that go no where are all over the place but there are a few that convince others that their idea is useful. They don't necessarily need to do the work to make their ideas a reality but they need to convince others that their ideas have value.

We need both dreamers and workers.

If you are an idea person figure out how to get others to believe in what you are dreaming and the idea will become a reality.

Think Steve Jobs, he was the idea guy that made his dreams a reality. People want to believe that he was some kind of super engineer or programmer but he was the one that was able to get all the super engineers to do their best to develop his ideas.

It's very prevalent in amateur gamedev communities. Every day there's someone who played some game, and has some ideas how to make it better. All he needs is a few programmers and artists to make his vision in reality. Usually the kind of projects he wants to make are big AAA games in whatever is the trending genre at the moment (used to be MMORPG, now it's about battle royale). When confronted they often get defensive and don't want to accept the reality that such big projects are made by hundreds of people with multimillion budgets, not by few guys working in a basement, no matter how dedicated they are).

Perfectly believable. I used to coach at startup events, and the dreamers who wanted to make the next Facebook were so exhausting. I eventually wrote up a a stock answer to give them: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-foolish-to-go-to-Startup-Weekend...

What really bothers me, though, is not the randos with this attitude. It's that some of them will grab enough money or power that they'll be able to live out their fantasy. And woe be unto any who hop on board. Quibi being the latest big example.

That’s much better than the alternative. Where their ideas are crap, and their contribution is a direct detriment.

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