Comment by dbosson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbosson | Hacker News Reader

I would like to debate Paul Gram's partiality towards hackers and whether or not this has a negative effect on creativity.

I will open the debate by arguing that being partial to a specific group of people, in this case hackers, does limit creativity. In Paul Gram's essay 'The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups' he says "when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds--almost impossibly hard in fact--because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy."

I don't understand why a really good programmer would not want to help implement the vision of a business guy.

The whole point of a startup is to improve people's lives. Paul Gram understands this; he even says the most important aspect of a startup is making something people want.

Well what if that business guy has a vision that will improve a lot of peoples lives? What if that business guy has an idea for something a lot of other business people would want? Why would a great programmer not want to work with the business guy?

My concern is that if hackers do not keep an open mind about working with others their creativity will be limited to their own interest, needs, and desires. If Hackers are only willing to implement their own visions they may be missing out on some wonderful opportunities to make something people want.

A) Graham (as in Grahamcrackers)

B) The problem is that just as business types are bad at evaluating hackers, hackers are bad at evaluating business types. No one wants to work with someone awful, and the best chance hackers have at avoiding that is to work with people they know how to judge--other hackers.

The issue is not that hackers hate working with business people, its that they hate working with people who are not good at what they do. Given this they use the only proficiency they have--programming--to evaluate people they'll be investing a year or five in.

When a friend of mine proposes a new programming project, I am often really excited about it and can't wait to get working on it; when someone who isn't a programmer proposes ideas its a lot less pleasant because they don't understand the constraints of programming.

When non-programmer Jimmy suggests an idea what it is that Jimmy thinks it would be cool if someone else made this idea into reality and let him profit on it. When a hacker suggests an idea they are saying "lets build this together." Who in their right mind would pick the former if they have a choice?

"The problem is that just as business types are bad at evaluating hackers, hackers are bad at evaluating business types."

That's a very good point. Perhaps someone familiar with the subject should try writing "Great Business Types" and "The Suit Paradox".

I'm a really good programmer. I want to implement my vision. I have several visions that I want to implement right now, as a matter of fact, and they're all vying for time with each other and with things like my day job and sleep.

If you want me to implement your vision, you can pay me (preferably more than my current employer does, with at least as much job security and at least a good quality of work-life balance), or you can convince me that your vision should be my vision, and is so much better than any of my visions that I need to start working on it at once.

Paying me is a heck of a lot easier.

"I don't understand why a really good programmer would not want to help implement the vision of a business guy."

Because the image that that sort of talk conjures is of me sitting around toiling trying to create something, and you leaning back in your plush chair saying "no no, it's got to do this too - no, wait, scratch that, let's change X, Y, and Z".

That's admittedly a caricature, and probably not very fair to you, but one of the reasons it's easier to be all hackers is that divying up work is made far easier. It's easy to see that everyone's pulling their weight.

I think there's a bug. I replied already to mention that the creators of auctomatic, zentix, and Sam Odio who works at Anybots are 100% business guys, but the post seems to have disappeared after dbosson deleted his original post.

Your comment is still alive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969

even though the post you commented on was deleted.

I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.

Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.

When he first deleted his original comment, it said (deleted) in its place, but my reply still showed up under it. I think that makes more sense than hiding all the children replies of a parent that is deleted.

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