vintya

Mudflap | Multiple Roles | Remote (US) | Full Time | https://www.mudflapinc.com/

We're building a marketplace that helps truckers save money on their #1 business expense -- fuel. Most truckers are small business owners and independent owner operators and fuel cost is a big item on their bottomline. Simultaneously, we also help drive business to smaller truck stops that have to compete with the big name brands. We're growing quickly and are building a modern, world-class platform for the trucking industry.

We're backed by some amazing investors and are growing our team across eng and product roles.

Our stack: Rails, Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android), Postgres, AWS

We're hiring for:

- Rails eng

- iOS and Android engs

- Product Manager

- DevOps/Infra Eng

- QA Test and Automation eng

Please apply here - https://www.mudflapinc.com/careers (will reach cofounder and eng lead).

Yea, I realized that :D

I realized my own folly - I certainly haven't built a profitable company or a popular product yet. I'm in the process but far from it yet. So I should stop commenting on what it takes to build one :)

I'm an idea guy, I'm also a coder. I can write code, that works. But I'm by no means a hacker. I'm not an MBA type, will never be. Once you're done writing some code, the prototype, something that works decently well - and to do that you don't need to be a nerdy hacker - you need skills that go far beyond the bits/bytes and if-else loopy world of programming.

It's really not that difficult to build a web product or service these days.

I wish I could explain my point better.

Bezos & Gates are brilliant businessmen. Woz is a superb engineer, a genius of an engineer, but Jobs truly built the Apple that is today. Brin & Page were highly capable and smart researchers and scientists, not programmers or "hackers" as the term goes here.

You're still not getting my point. Nevermind.

Programmers or hackers don't build companies. Yes, they build a product or a service - the best ones can create magic. But it stops there. You need smart enterprising people who understand the bigger picture and the ecosystem, how different pieces of the puzzle fit together, how to make money out of all that stuff that's been built. You need the idea men, and the executioners. It's so wrong I believe to make programming or hacking skills/smarts/history the most important qualifying criteria for being accepted to YC, or the most important indicator of potential success.

My point is this - the barrier to entry and delivering a decent web product/service has come down a lot over the years. With frameworks such as RoR, countless online articles that literally spoon feed ready made solutions to common problems, stumbling blocks, and an above average intelligence, one can build a good enough web service these days.

Sure, building something state of the art requires true "hacking" skills and genuine creativity and intelligence - but how often do you really see such web companies these days? Most ideas are simple, some downright silly, and only a few that are products of intelligent hacking. Do you agree?