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Comment by siiily | Hacker News Reader

There are 63 slides, the 60th slide ends with: sell anything, learn to code the 61th slide contains a photo of the author the 62th slide contains the word: Questions?

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Ruby on Rails is easy, if you're a business guy learn to code and save yourself some money & equity

Okay, now I know I don't want to use this guy's products...

Comon', you know what i mean :) I'm not saying i have an "engineer-level", but i'm good enough to throw an MVP together. Try out http://fastfwdme.com, it works fine for a small project I developed. Of course there are years of training to be a good hacker, but my point is that you can achieve a sufficient level to test ideas out yourself.

Nice attitude... but just the sentence "throw an MVP together" makes me cringe :) do yourself a favour and find yourself a good dev before you realize your code doesn't actually scale...

Andrea, I agree. But depending on where you are, "finding a good dev" can take months, more if you're looking for a partner. And it's easier to attract talent with a working prototype than with ideas around a beer...

I was probably mistaken, let me rephrase: it's awesome that you, as a business guy, actually took the time and had the patience to learn Rails, no matter what the results - and it will surely impress the developers you will try to hire in the future. Between that and Rails is easy, learn it yourself and save money there's quite of a difference :-)

If you want to be an awesome business guy, learn how to code so you can talk with your devs more effectively. But for the sake of your project don't try to replace them :-)

Of course, you're right. And I think we agree.

The other thing is that in tech startups, being the "crunch the number and shit slides" guy can be quite frustrating. Knowing how to put up a prototype yourself is pretty satisfying!

... and sorry to make your cringe :)

who would you rather work with, a "biz guy" who has built a prototype that can't scale or a "biz guy" who has been talking about an idea for 3 months but doing nothing?

I would rather not work with any developer who underestimates business guys at this level.

Now, if you want to make the next "To Do" app, a dev can be fine, but if you want to do something useful, you will need a biz guy.

I mean, this thinking from the dev side is exactly why companies today are full of crappy products (SAP, Windows, etc.).

Read the comment you replied to again; you misinterpreted it as attacking "biz guys," but it's actually commending those willing to get their hands dirty.

I'm not the grandparent poster, but I think his point was:

Programming is not the only thing that constitutes "getting your hands dirty," i.e. the "real work", and that anyone who thinks this is completely overlooking the importance of business principles.

It is implied. It is kind of the norm to think of business people as useless around here.

My point is that this is stupid, really stupid. There are tons of problems in the business world and they are tackled with old software from the '90 (Windows, Office, SAP, etc.). Web technologies have not even touched the corporate world.

Devs will never get the potential behind business problems because they hardly know about them. They need business people, they really do. And the business world needs them, because things are getting crazy, mining data with Excel...

just to be clear, I am a "biz guy" who also happens to write usable code...I am the last one to discount the value of "the biz guy." So there.

Why not build something yourself and find a dev when scaling is needed? With Rails it's quite easy to create okay code that'll work just fine in the beginning. The code obviously won't be great, but it'll scale to a couple of thousands of users without major problems.

There's no point of spending a lot of money on a professional developer until you have validated that your business idea has any potential. That's especially true in most early startup where money is really scarce.

And even if you don't plan to be a technical founder, it's quite a good idea to at least could program a little bit. It will make it much easier to communicate with developers and understand technical issues.

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