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'I Just Need a Programmer'
theodp writes "As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'"
Geocities in apps format.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I just need a beer...
My words exactly! But whenever I ask for an engineer who has some spare time to build that for me, people start laughing. Odd...
That's why I try to the be programmer who comes up with the great idea.
Ah, my next great idea: a web text editor for the dyslexic.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You do realize that you are posting on a website that: a) made its founders a fair chunk of change and b) was first implemented as a disastrous mess of perl spaghetti code.
Oh dear God in heaven do NOT even think it, much less say it! Good God man, do you have ANY idea the soul sucking den of evil you are making light of? Imagine, you are just a humming along, all happy as can be with your shotgunned modems and your overclocked Celeron pumping 600MHz with Win98 stripped down like a used Buick all hot rodded when BAM...you hit the tar pit that is Geocities.
Suddenly all the fans scream to life, desperately trying to keep the Comet Cursor that suddenly is hanging a fricking pocket watch off your arrow like a swing ball of snot from blowing your CPU, your modems strain under a bazillion animated GIFs, while you are blinded by a neon purple background with snot green text in the always evil "OMG Ponies!" style, complete with little stardust shit dripping off their "brilliant" prose, when SLAM the overload of total lameness kills Win98 and you are staring at a BSOD, which sadly is kinda comforting at that moment because at least it ain't fricking purple or swinging snot clocks. So don't joke about Geocities pal, those of us that lived through it will end up having nightmares! That is like joking about Bonzi Buddy to PC repairman, you just DON'T, okay?
As for TFA, the reason they probably think it is "just a programmer" is thanks to offshoring that is how pretty much ALL IT is treated today. Experience and education don't mean jack when they can hire a guy from Bangalore for $15k a year. So they are just thinking like future CEOs and looking at the programmers as "just the help" which sadly is the way many are treated in this crap economy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What do you mean "_was_ _first_ implemented" ?
Carefully crafted sig.
I would have to disagree. The difference between wealth and having a second job isn't in whether you can code the idea. Any 15-year-old idiot can probably code an idea, unless it's very complex. How well you can do it is nearly paramount. You know, for example, that most sort algorithms max out at an efficiency of Clog(n)[element_count], as a rough description. You know who makes six figures a year? The guy who can reduce "C" by five percent. And no, you can't do that with shell scripts and lines of spaghetti code.
c = 299,792,458 metres per second - it's not just a good idea - it's the law. Of course you can't do it with shell scripts. You need at least a Mr. Fusion.
Goddam it, why do all Slashdot discussions end up discussing the Nazis???