You Are the Exception to the Rule

https://zapier.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-are-exception-rule/

by WadeF • 14 years ago

178 46 14 years ago

apl2• 14 years ago

This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better.

Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement.

[ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders can't do FizzBuzz" meme that generally accompanies the flowery you're-a-special-snowflake-talk. Applicants maybe, but that doesn't say much. There's tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won't get famous or found a sustainable business.]

wdewind• 14 years ago

He wasn't saying you aren't mediocre. He's just saying that often you don't see value in the things you already know how to do, because you assume others have the same problems and abilities that you do. Essentially he's just saying you need to step into your users' shoes better, it's not a feel good post.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

I have the same problem, in that I tend to think that, if I can do it, that it must be trivial, when a lot of things that I can do at this point are not actually trivial for most people.

Still, I don't harbor the delusion that I could drop everything and write a $10k/month iPad app overnight. There's a lot of luck in that, and a lot of skills are required (marketing, presentation) that I wouldn't bet my career on me having.

I think it's worth it for people to try things that have a sub-50% chance of success if they'll learn something from it, and if they've limited their losses, but I think it's unreasonable to make major bets on not being in the N-1 out of N. The academic career racket is fueled by these sorts of unrealistic expectations (more specifically, by people who haven't figured out that the academic job market up-and-died a generation and a half ago).

lotharbot• 14 years ago

Think about what you spend money on, and the people behind it. They might be making your lunch, bagging your groceries, or mowing your lawn. They are probably mediocre at it, but you pay them anyway.

Others will pay you decent money to do a mediocre job, and good money to do a good job, because you are the exception to the rule of being willing and able to do the thing for them at all. Most people who have problem X would rather pay money for you to solve some problem for them (even if your solution is mediocre) than solve it themselves, because that allows them to focus on solving whatever problem they care about or think they can get paid for.

itmag• 14 years ago

Also, look at corporations in general. A lot of them are inefficient and it seems like a miracle that they can make any money at all. Yet they clear big bucks. If big lumbering TPS-churning corporations can create value, then so can agile me. If someone whose job it is to shuffle papers and write memos can make a large salary, then why shouldn't my command of programming be valuable?

All in all, I think it's better to have the belief "I am worth lots of money" than the opposite.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

There are several orders of magnitude between getting famous and founding a sustainable business.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

Getting famous is easier than reaching the level of competence that will give a person the ability to reliably found sustainable businesses.

(I'm not kidding.)

tlogan2• 14 years ago

Actually founding a sustainable business is much harder than getting famous.

Getting famous (at least for hackers) requires that your are very good at one thing and you publish that on github or something. Hard but achievable.

Founding a sustainable business requires that you know customer acquisition, marketing, management, etc.

Cushman• 14 years ago

Conversely, I see zero value in this kind of reactionarily pessimistic you're-average-at-everything-and-even-if-you're-good-you'll-probably-fail-anyway stuff that always turns up on any encouraging article.

You get zero points for being able to say "See, I was right" when someone fails. Completely aside from that, it's factually wrong; people on this site are quite likely to have skills and resources that the average person cannot comprehend. Being a "decent programmer" is a fabulously valuable skill in the modern world. You aren't guaranteed to be able to leverage it into capital right away, but if you work hard and get out of your own head it's fully achievable.

heeton• 14 years ago

I like to think:

"I am not a special snowflake, the sun does not shine out of my ass. But, if I work hard and apply my skills creatively in areas where others aren't it doing it as much, I may well have a shot at something cool. At least, a better shot than if I did nothing today"

ivanmilles• 14 years ago

I'll print this and hang it on the wall above my machine. Brilliant.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

> I still don't trust the "Most coders can't do FizzBuzz" meme that generally accompanies the flowery you're-a-special-snowflake-talk.

Well of course, such talk misses the point. A "Coder" who can't do Fizzbuzz isn't a coder, or a programmer, or a hacker, or a computer scientist. It's a negative test, if you can't do it, then your not ready for a real programming gig yet.

From http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev... (Which appears to be the source of the infamous fizzbuzz question.)

"This sort of question won’t identify great programmers, but it will identify the weak ones. And that’s definitely a step in the right direction."

delinka• 14 years ago

"It's a negative test, if you can't do it, then [you're] not ready for a real programming gig yet."

To which I will add, if you can do it, it doesn't mean that you are ready for a real programming gig. Yet.

simondlr• 14 years ago

Referencing Jeff Atwood's post: How is it possible that CS graduates can't do fizzbuzz?!

chrischen3• 14 years ago

Yea but if I am the exception then you may have discouraged and prevented me from succeeding. If not, not much harm done right? All for what, so you can say I told you so 99% of the time?

diego• 14 years ago

If a comment like that can discourage you, you are not ready. It's like starting to train for a marathon and quickly forgetting the idea because you don't like your shoes, or something equally trivial.

If you think I exaggerate, try staying focused on your startup after months of investor rejection (which is the norm, by the way).

jodrellblank• 14 years ago

Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better.

Have you considered that if you had hard evidence, it wouldn't be a 'belief', it would be a known fact?

And from there, why humans have evolved an ability to believe ... at all? What function that provides in a mind? Beliefs don't have to accurately reflect reality for them to be useful in changing your behaviour for the better.

neilk• 14 years ago

> There's tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won't get famous or found a sustainable business.

I think we read this article differently. His point is that, programming-wise, it doesn't take a lot to make a successful business. He's saying that being mediocre is good enough.

dougws2• 14 years ago

Please re-read the article--the author is absolutely not making the point you think he is. All he is saying is that hackers are less likely to be willing to pay for software than most people, so the fact that the typical hacker news reader is unwilling to pay for something doesn't mean that it isn't a viable product. It's a shame that the top comment on this article is attacking a straw-man argument.

tptacek• 14 years ago

Yep. I reread the top comment after your comment and I'm pretty sure 'apl just skimmed this post; regardless, he's missed the point entirely.

chrischen3• 14 years ago

There's a difference between "you're probably going to fail" and "you're probably going to fail so don't even hope (or try)."

csallen• 14 years ago

Your response reads as if you didn't fully grasp the article, and instead attempted to extrapolate what it might say based on the first paragraph alone.

The author doesn't claim that readers are the exception to mediocrity. Nor does he claim that they are the exception to failure. The article is targeted at programmers. He's merely saying that programmers possess a unique perspective that makes them literally "exceptionally" cynical to paying for software. He's also pointing out that it's easy to incorrectly project one's own cynism onto others.

vijayr• 14 years ago

In some ways, software is like law (or accounting) - why do we pay lawyers so much money, even though in many cases we can simply file the paperwork ourselves? Why do we pay someone else to file our taxes, while we can do it ourselves? Being a "decent lawyer" is a very valuable skill, so is being a "decent programmer" or "decent anything". Just because something is not difficult to do, doesn't mean people would actually do it. They are busy, they don't like to learn something new, programming doesn't interest them etc.

Every skill is valuable. What is trivial for us, could be very difficult for someone else, and vice versa.

r00fus• 14 years ago

> In some ways, software is like law (or accounting) - why do we pay lawyers so much money, even though in many cases we can simply file the paperwork ourselves?

This is because the simple case (ie, everything goes well) for both programming and most law (leave aside liitgation) are usually straightforward.

The problem comes in exception handling. This is the 80/20 pareto split (80% of labor done on 20% of scope) - at this point, even a good lawyer/programmer may have difficulties getting things to work properly.

smarx• 14 years ago

I have to say, my startup has struggled with this. We're a two-man shop, and neither of us buys phone apps, pays for virtual goods, clicks on ads, etc. It tends to make us think that other people don't do those things either, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Part of the article's conclusion is, "Get the product in front of your core audience," and I suspect that's the only way for the inexperienced to accurately gauge the value of their product.

allardschip• 14 years ago

It's the way for anyone, experienced or not.

nadam• 14 years ago

Just go to donwload.com or Apple's appstore and look at the tens of thousands of applications/apps there. All those programmers who created those applications/apps can do FizzBuzz and more. But only a fraction of them make good money from these applications. Making good money from a software product is hard. Yes, go for it, but these kind of motivational posts will be a bit irritating after your first failure.

manmal• 14 years ago

Many of these apps and tools do not have unique creators - there are devs who churn out apps like crazy, multiple of apps per year. Also, many do not try to make a living off of this - go figure, how much can you possibly earn with a top-10% mobile app? How long will earnings last? Seems more like a lottery to me. The article's writer means SaaS products, and I doubt that your chances of financial success are nearly as high with mobile apps you put in stores.

tlogan2• 14 years ago

Question: is zapier.com profitable?

(I'm asking because if zapier is profitable then blog post has some merit. If not then... oh well)

nickconfer• 14 years ago

They're set up very well. Can't say more than that, I'll leave it to their team to give the details they choose.

rekky123• 14 years ago

Bullshit.

follower• 14 years ago

As developers we often have the mistaken belief that "anyone else could do what I can do, would rather do it themselves and won't pay for anyone else to do it for them".

This comes from a mindset that because I can do something, would rather than do it myself and wouldn't pay for someone else to do it for me means that no one else would either.

Just because you can solve a problem yourself, would take the time to do so and wouldn't pay someone else to do it instead doesn't mean the rest of the world thinks like that.

For most people, they can't do what you do and/or wouldn't take the time to do it and/or would rather pay someone else to do it for them. That's the rule to which you're an exception.

ams6110• 14 years ago

if you search around the internet you'll find dozens of products that aren't complicated, but make stacks of Benjamin Franklins for the developers of those products

I think this is particularly true if you can target a point of friction in the sales process, e.g. real-estate. I have had agents tell me that if they think something will make them one extra sale a year they won't even hesitate to spend a couple of hundred dollars on it.

dougws2• 14 years ago

This is absolutely true. Market validation goes both ways! Don't assume a product is either viable or unviable without confirmation from the intended consumers.

ilkandi• 14 years ago

I met a 50ish solo programmer a few months ago. His application handles an issue for a specific subset of nonprofit org (I'm probably not giving away too much if I say, churches). The app is not web enabled, it's not social, it doesn't run on ios android or mac. From our conversation I inferred he spends hardly any time on marketing it because he doesn't need more users. Yet he makes a comfortable living solely from the licenses, doesn't touch the app for weeks at a time, and adds new features on his own schedule.

patdennis• 14 years ago

As a non-programmer who works in a field that 99% of programmers aren't aware even exists, I would like to point out that there are a lot of simple software programs to be made for specialized purposes in various fields. They don't exist because nobody who can build them knows they're necessary, and the people who need them don't know they're possible.

jiakeliu• 14 years ago

I think people tend to generalize things. I, for example, have the mentality that if I understand\learn something with little effort, then others can do the same. The truth is, the others usually don't bother to put forth that little effort, which makes me the exception to the rule. For example, I recently made a decent chunk of money by creating a simple WordPress site that was valuable enough for my client...I would've paid a fraction of what my client paid if I was him. So I definitely concur with this post.

horsehead• 14 years ago

I've seen SEVERAL times that "most programmers can't solve fizzbuzz." I did this after just a few months of learning python, on paper no less (Ok, i had one if/elif statement in the wrong spot. a quick run of the script in the command line showed me it didn't work how I thought it should and I fixed it).

But are there any DATA that corroborate this largely anecdotal statement? I figure, it has to be much less prevalent than these statements. (Or if it isn't, I better get my ass in gear and really learn to program so I can make the big bucks).

You Are the Exception to the Rule

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