So you "just need a hacker", huh?

by carpal • 18 years ago

75 98 18 years ago

earle2• 18 years ago

stubborn

earle2• 18 years ago

the immediate downmods of my original comment of "stubborn" seems to be further testament to the overall quality in capacity for this site lately.

the authors comments are emotionally loaded opinions that are quite frankly, a result of immaturity and frustration.

so my original comment stands:

stubborn.

davidw• 18 years ago

It was not a great comment, but I'd also like to say that we've had, if not quite a tradition... many of us have encouraged people not to downvote beyond -1 or 0 for comments that are not "really bad" (racist, outright insults, spam, that kind of thing).

brk• 18 years ago

Brilliant!

ejs• 18 years ago

This sounds just like a zed shaw rant, in fact I think he says the exact same thing in some article. For the most part this is usually true (although abrupt), it is often hard to break it to people that their 'awesome idea' really isn't worth anything.

carpal5• 18 years ago

Pretty much any solid rant sounds like a Zed Shaw rant.

run4yourlives3• 18 years ago

Sounds as young as he looks.

My advice: Never pass up a good opportunity.

mixmax8• 18 years ago

It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO.

While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need because hacking something together happens to be the first step to creating a great company.

The key insight is that no great company was made by only one guy. It takes both great hackers, great marketing people, great CEO's and great sales people. Hell, maybe you even need a great janitor...

So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who needs who.

webframp• 18 years ago

traditionally the hackers have been the most undervalued in the whole equation.

mixmax8• 18 years ago

Yes they have, probably because hackers are the only ones in the equation who don't need to be good at selling, bullshitting and staking out territory.

Hackers should try and become better at selling themselves and knowing their worth. This, however, is an art - selling yourself well is a very subtle and hard thing to get right. Underdo it and you won't get results. Overdo it and you'll sound like a pretentious asshole.

kingkongrevenge2• 18 years ago

Philip Greenspun wrote convincingly about how programmers are under valued because they fail to treat programming as a proper profession. They don't dress and otherwise present themselves professionally. They fail to interface professionally with customers and analysts as a doctor or lawyer would. Programmers themselves tend to demand a management style that treats them as a cog in the machine, where they are fed detailed requirements and produce output for others to deal with.

The nature of programming work is not so far removed from what a corporate lawyer or financial analyst does. Yet programmers have a much different public image. I think it's fair to say programming attracts certain idiosyncratic personalities that affect the general perception of the work.

On the same theme as the grandparent post, don't undervalue the soft touch. There are people who bring to the table little more than that they're nice and likeable. I've seen such people in analyst roles responsible for retaining or creating substantial business.

jmtulloss4• 18 years ago

Sure I need a brilliant CEO, brilliant marketing guy, etc, etc. But first I need a great product. I'm going to make that, not the other guys.

tom_rath2• 18 years ago

You wouldn't start coding something before you'd fleshed out a design, right? So why would you start designing something before you identified the market for it?

Marketing is the social component of design, and you need brilliant marketing before you can create that brilliant product.

run4yourlives3• 18 years ago

You just might want to make sure you have some people interested in buying your "great product" too.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

“Founders at Work” is an interesting book because you realize that there is no One Right Way to make a successful startup, not even the Paul Graham way! Some are started by hackers only, others include capable business people who were friends of the founding hackers. Some sold a product from the get go and others just went for eye-share. There are many additional degrees of freedom.

The needs of your startup will vary based on your business model. Smart, motivated people have a way of being useful, regardless of their education.

h34t• 18 years ago

The Prize by Daniel Yergin is another great book that totally demolished all assumptions I'd had of what a "successful businessperson" looked like. It's a history of the oil industry, and I was riveted by how colorful and different the various major personalities were.

tptacek6• 18 years ago

What's more true is that pairwise, no two of these roles really understand each other.

mixmax8• 18 years ago

People that understand and appreciate all sides of the equation are worth their weight in gold - unfortunately they are also very hard to find.

notauser2• 18 years ago

I wonder which is really harder, becoming a good enough coder, or becoming a good enough $specialty.

Computers are, lets face it, logical things. How much programming skill do you _really_ need to build a prototype? The ability to logically think through a problem, the ability to decompose it into small enough chunks, and then to make those chunks work. Sure, it won't be pretty or elegant or scale if you suck at data structures and algorithms, but it doesn't _need_ to be pretty and elegant to get through the prototype stage. Heck some major sites are ugly, inelegant, and scale like a man climbing a wet glass wall.

Fortunately computers are viewed as 'super hard' (genuine quote) by the general population... for now. If that changes, by virtue of people being introduced to start-simple-get-complex coding (eg excel macros, flash) or easier creation tools being developed, geeks who bang out simple web apps could be much less competitive as startup founders.

That's not to say they won't be valued - someone will need to clean up the huge pile of steaming junk thrown out by Dreamweaver 6. And there will still be genuinely hard problems to solve... which is one reason why I'm basing my startup on a problem set that requires efficient graph coloring and traversal :)

Bluem00• 18 years ago

Great point. Your comment reminds me of a story we had here about a week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136087

alex_c• 18 years ago

I can't help but wonder whether this was inspired by the Facebook dev forums.

dangrover• 18 years ago

I liked this rant, immature as it might be.

Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it.

Before I even hear their idea, I do a simple mental calculation.

First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition to being a programmer. They better at least match that and have actually worked on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves.

The person needs to be as competent in their supposed field as I am in mine. The value that people who are good at selling and networking bring is incalculable, I'd kill for a co-founder that could bring that. But they have to be as crazy and devoted to it as I am towards my coding, or else it just can't work.

Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(

tim23• 18 years ago

Send them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate. Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

I wouldn't work for rates "competitive" with those at eLance or Rent-A-Coder. I've done projects through those sites, and despite explicitly stating, "Don't bother with lowball offers--we're looking for good work, not low prices. We are developers, and we will be judging your experience and code harshly." I still got bids of 150 bucks for a project that I would have billed a weeks worth of hours for. They, of course, would do a horrible job, and not even worth that much...but you shouldn't try to compete on price with those folks.

ten-seven• 18 years ago

Lots of people are Jacks of All Trades, but masters of none. Take, for example, the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen movie franchise. Everybody had skills and roles to play. It wasn't possible for one person to be in all places all the time, nor was it possible for a single person to perform each job.

This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.

DocSavage• 18 years ago

I heard a Hollywood producer reference Ocean's Eleven in the same way. Moviemaking requires a ton of skills spread out over a large number of specialists. So what if the author has a business degree. Does he have mad business skills?

timr• 18 years ago

Yeah. It also wasn't possible to knock out all of the power in Las Vegas with an EMP bomb, to lift a mansion covertly with a 12-man team in one night, or to "hack" into a casino's "security system" by clipping little tiny things to a few network cables.

That's because those were movies.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

The problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs.

Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--

carpal5• 18 years ago

There are two main differences:

1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie).

2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.

carpal5• 18 years ago

I went a bit more in-depth here:

http://subwindow.com/articles/12

It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.

frouaix• 18 years ago

Is Hacker News the new slashdot or what? How come this entry made it to the top of the page? And a note for Erik Peterson: some future day when you discover that you need some help for something you don't quite understand fully, you might regret having written that blog entry.

edw519• 18 years ago

I sure hope he doesn't need as many lines of code to build something as he needs cuss words to make a point.

ardit332• 18 years ago

What a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of the company.

If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:

1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital.

2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity.

If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream.

See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere.

As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.

ardit332• 18 years ago

Ah, and a lot of people mention Jobs as a non-hacker, which is simply not true. He was a hacker, but with great businness sense.

"Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14]

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."

tptacek6• 18 years ago

Commenters here talk as if no successful business was ever started by a sharp businessperson who hired software developers.

Clearly, many such businesses exist.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

I know of businesses who look like they were started by businesspeople who hired hackers because the hackers were later ousted (like digg). The businessperson displaced the hacker after the fact. Can you think of any businesses were there where this clearly didn't happen? Can you think you any successful software company started by a businessperson who paid consulting fees to thoughtworks or IBM, set up a booth at a CS department to recruit techies, or paid a headhunter?

tptacek6• 18 years ago

Amazon.

Tichy2• 18 years ago

Stuff like that makes me wonder if I should start a "Never ever work with that person, no matter what"-list.

Tichy2• 18 years ago

Ruby book: 30$ - Rails book: 30$ - Never have to work with arrogant hackers again: priceless!

pg3• 18 years ago

This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be.

Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.

wumi• 18 years ago

with the considerable amount of traffic that HN can drive to a link/ blog (and such a specific audience) any thought that the "recently arrived users" may be gaming HN?

pg3• 18 years ago

There has been an increase in spam lately, but there was no sign of that here. I wish...

chaostheory6• 18 years ago

The link itself maybe an embarrassment, but the discussions surrounding it on YC are somewhat less emotional and pretty interesting; and they do touch upon the reasons why it happens (particularly the thread started by mixmax)

pg3• 18 years ago

I noticed that too. It's like stone soup. Still, chicken soup would be better.

dkokelley• 18 years ago

I wonder about the behavior of HN users. Do they vote up an article for the article, or for the discussion taking place?

Sure the (original) article does not deserve to make it to the top of HN, so why is it up there? Is it being up-voted because of the content of the article, or the content of the discussion, or because commenters have posted in a popular article and want their comment seen/possibly up-modded?

The last case is obviously the least desirable, but what about the other two? What should the community be voting on?

henning• 18 years ago

You made me feel bad for LOLing at the article. :(

Regardless of his feelings on solutions and causes, it's not like an Internet rant is going to change post-industrial work relations in developed countries. Certainly the people at fault will never read it.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

you should check this out http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=carpal. clearly carpal has some issues other than business guys. imo he needs attention sooo bad that 80% of his posts are somehow about someone attacking a product or a group of people. carpal get a life man and please if you cannot add to our intelligence do not take away from our precious and scarce time. and yes i am a business guy with 0 programming skills and i would never want to work with you even if that meant my startup would never come to life and you were paying me to work on it.

gaika• 18 years ago

Yeah, simple trust metric would be very nice here. Give more weight to people who vote like you and everything will be ranked as if you did it.

fortes• 18 years ago

Perhaps new accounts shouldn't be able to vote stories up (only comment, and vote on comments). Through usage, the account would then earn the right to vote -- the hope being that they would have enough time to learn the culture.

carpal5• 18 years ago

I never expected it to get this high. The post was a rant and, as most rants do, turned out to be a bad idea.

I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.

immad• 18 years ago

The current link asks me to download a binary file when I click it in FF 2.0. Whats up with that?

r7000• 18 years ago

For a quick switch your replacement text seems much better thought out!

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Ah, that explains it. I read the article and wondered what everyone was so worked up about. The new version that I read actually is very complimentary on the importance of hackers.

t0pj2• 18 years ago

Perhaps keeping tabs on how karma is used.

Are the recently arrived users simply voting up articles yet not adding any comments of their own to explain why they've voted up?

How about this?

If a person votes up an article (which costs a point), a contributing comment by the same person can start out at 2 points instead of 1. You're basically paying back the point taken to vote up an article. This would give more incentive for users to voice their opinion instead of simply voting up (without commenting) as well as now giving others a chance to agree/disagree. If their comments don't really add any value, they'll receive bad karma as normal.

You can also show a flag next to the user id to show whether they voted for this article or not.

joseakle• 18 years ago

This sounds similar to the rules Yahoo Answers has.

What about users who vote up a story so that it is stored in their history? I do it often, i like a story but don't think i have much to add to the conversation, but still want to keep it.

lacker• 18 years ago

Vote weighting is possible, but maybe it's too extreme yet blunt for the problem at hand. Vote weighting would affect all articles, but really there's a specific problem of popular-but-trashy articles that you want to target.

For example, you could add a penalty for negative-rated comments. A trashy article is more likely to cause the sort of argument that gets comments downrated.

Or you could try to classify the comment contents and organization to get a sense of how "argumentative" vs "quality" they are. Bayesian if you want. You could use article contents, too, if you had a scraper.

Either way the ranking algorithm will have to get more complicated as time goes on. Logically you should have more information with more users, so the quality of articles should actually get better. The problem with vote weighting is that by downweighting votes you are discarding this extra information rather than using it more cleverly.

eusman• 18 years ago

so, most of the new users voted up for this story, and the older users contributed the comments in the story...this is interesting about the "quality" of the users, so maybe the weighting that will affect story order, should take in mind user contribution(karma) in comments...

So, maybe comments's karma should be kept as a different record. And there should be comments weighting too, because we wouldn't want new users to game the system with each other and thus game again the weighting system for the story order.

"Quality" could be expressed as "experience" because obviously people adapted in the climate of YC.news who behave the expected way, as you say you expect to happen and thus the problem correct it self. But expecting the situation to correct it self may not be the right way.

Expected way though shouldn't be mean is the correct way, because the community would remain closed instead of being open.

So, because of the problems that arise with a weighting system making it probably not democratic, the most correct way for weighting would be to happen in manual down voting, which should appear only for "experienced users".

Weighting should happen there, so for example if you have 1 experienced user up voting and another one down voting, their vote is eliminated, which positive/negative difference could be used in two ways:

1. added in the current points of the story

2. or a non-linear scale be used that would determine the quality of the story.

what do you think?

dood• 18 years ago

I think the best solution to maintaining the quality of a rapidly growing community/vote driven site is restricting the flow of new users by providing disincentives. Metafilter (for example) has a $5 sign up fee.

Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.

Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

As a non-coder who is cursed with a brain that comes up with a constant flow of creative ideas that my fingers can't execute, you've just shattered my world. Screw you. Oh, and do you mind if I borrow some of your old reference manuals, I just decided to learn how to program. ;-)

Harj• 18 years ago

this presents a rather binary view of things - either you're a hacker or you're an arrogant MBA.

there are plenty of people who aren't hackers but they certainly understand tech and aren't beef-headed MBA's. mitch kapor and joe kraus never wrote a line of code.

admoin• 18 years ago

I think the author has a point, but I think hackers are guilty of similar behavior regarding legal and finance expertise, both of which are critically important in keeping and profiting (respectively) from your hacking. I think it's really just pretty self-evident that people will overvalue their own field of knowledge, and consider other fields to be less important/valuable than they actually are.

joeter• 18 years ago

This sounds as hysterical as if someone told me, "If you don't know Mandarin, don't do any business with/in China!"

Delegation of responsibility is a concept of pivotal importance for any entrepreneur to grasp if they want to go very big. Isn't Richard Branson dyslexic?

gruseom• 18 years ago

Someone (aswanson?) posted a question I thought was really good, and was replying to with the following. But when I hit "Add Comment", it seemed the post was deleted in the meantime. I'm going to put my reply up anyway 'cause I spent 5 minutes writing it :)

The question was: how did the situation get this way, with creative and knowledgeable people being told what to do by often clueless managers and MBAs, who have no particular expertise? It seems irrational and it's not obvious why the world would work this way.

Jerry Weinberg, who was one of the first few computer programmers in the world and later became famous as a writer, was asked this once. He said that the first few generations of programmers (up to 1970 or so) were arrogant towards customers, businesspeople, and managers. Programmers were so scarce, and computing itself so unfamiliar and scary, that programmers expected and were given a kind of godlike deference, which they abused. After a while, customers got angry about the fact that they didn't have a say, were treated like idiots, and given stuff that didn't work very well. Eventually, Weinberg said, this led to a backlash whereby managerial control was imposed on programmers. The effects of this backlash persist today.

I don't claim that this is the only answer to the question, but it sounds like a piece of the puzzle, at least in the software business. The thing about the backlash is that it also failed, leading to the irrational situation the original questioner described.

Perhaps the current generation of entrepreneur hackers can be seen in this context, as programmers who have creative control, but also really care about building what customers want.

So you "just need a hacker", huh?

Related Stories