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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think she's right. But she's not saying anything 100 other posts haven't tried to pound into our heads.

So many marketers keep writing this article because so many techies keep trying to do marketing, as if it weren't a real skill.

It's also the case that if we'd just check our egos at the gate for a little while, we have more to learn from the salesy/marketey people than from yet another web framework developer; after all, most of the devs I know are proud of figuring the dev stuff out for themselves.

She's not "right", She's just coasting on a generalization. If I say "physicists can't surf", I can probably find twenty examples to prove it but it will still be a ridiculous generalization.

The best physicists probably can't surf.

I'd be shocked if a professional surfer could tell me much about physics.

Just because you can, it doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'm a lot more effective as a marketer when I am selling someone else's code versus something I could scrap together.

Garrett Lisi is a pretty good surfer/physicist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi

nice find! amazing guy.

this is exactly why stereotypes and generalizations are a disservice to everyone. there are times when statistics are applicable, eg making business decisions based on market research. maybe it is even relevant when deciding what to write about. however, it is complete baloney when it comes to making a judgment about individuals. For that matter, it makes for a stupid, black-and-white, controversial blog post title...which i suppose is the point.

I think most surfers have a more intuitive sense of physics than normal people. We are after all the only ones that actually ride waves - and waves, be they sound or light, are pretty important in physics :)

This doesn't excuse programmers from ignoring your advice. We're a stubborn lot, and we make a living diving into situations where we have no idea what the hell we're doing, figuring it out, and carrying the day that way. We try to apply that to marketing, which is why most of our companies fail - it doesn't work that way in other fields. The ability to learn on the fly is usually more costly than it is with building software.

Being a physicist and being a surfer are not particularly correlated. As it turns out, being a physicist is rare, as is being a surfer, so finding a physicist surfer is unlikely, but that alone doesn't speak to the correlation of those skills.

Having a debilitating disease such as ALS is almost certainly much more strongly negatively correlated with being a physicist than is surfing, yet nobody would be silly enough (given the notable counter example) to say "people with ALS can't be physicists" as a blanket statement.

A large number of astrophysicists (especially the ones with a Astronomy bent) tend to be of the hippy/surfer crowd. Or at least used to be!

Apparently, you've never heard of Garrett Lisi.

But he is definitely not your standard Physicist.

No it wouldn't if it were true for, let's say, 9 physicists out of 10. But then such a statement would probably be true for all of mankind.

Human beings can't surf.

I think you just exemplified how ridiculous that generalisation was.

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