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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 disagree. A terrible idea with a beautifully executed development goes no where. A great idea that is hacked together with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code can make someone a fortune and (lame as it sounds) change the world.
That said I think having solid developer(s) is a really good thing. It costs less, makes for a more reliable product, and enables you to say "yeah, we can add that" vs. "hah, you'd have to rewrite everything" when further great ideas come along.
But saying that the importance of programming is on par with the idea.. it's not. Much as us programmers like to think we are _the_ critical component.. I really don't think we are in a lot of cases. The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful. HR tends to think of programmers as production line workers.. and as much as I hate to admit it, there really is truth in that. We turn ideas into something tangible so they can be sold. If we produce better products or produce them more efficiently, we make the company more money.. but we arn't as important as the guy's who tell us what to make, or the guy's who get people to pay for it.
As for idea people learning to program.. I don't buy it. Might work for some people, but I think programming/working with technology is either something you enjoy or you don't. Most good programers I know don't care about the end product as much as the code. The end product is a necessary evil.. a reason to justify their code poetry. Learning programming as a way of achieving and end goal sounds like some bad code about to happen. And I thought the whole "managers can write code thing" died with COBOL.
If someone says that, "they just need a programmer", they haven't vetted the idea. If they really knew what they wanted, they wouldn't need a programmer - they'd need a contract fulfilled for a specific task. If you say that crap, you're just a bullshit marketing guy.
idea people often take the form of upper management. they always assume their ideas are workable, and if their employees are having trouble rewriting reality to make them happen, then it's due to the employees' ignorance and not their own. classic ivory tower syndrome.
My words exactly! But whenever I ask for an engineer who has some spare time to build that for me, people start laughing. Odd...
Really, I am already re-thinking my earlier reply. The issue here is summed up in one word - "Just". You think you need "Just" a programmer, or "Just" a marketing guy, or "Just" a salesman? You have already told me that you don't really value their contribution to the effort, and additionally that you don't really understand fully what goes in to the work they're doing. Yeah, you have a genius idea. You don't want "Just" a programmer. You want a genius programmer, preferably either with a passion for your cause, or a resume of working in coding similar things. Otherwise, your operating system is being written by "just" a database programmer, and while you will have great search times, you may find other areas coming up short.
I've met people who have excellent working software, and have had it for years, and simply aren't able to make a business out of it. They think I just need an investor! And this when it would take them hundreds of dollars to actually start their business, after which they'd have a lot more value to an investor, if they decided they still need one.
Bruce Perens.
We should unionize. Conservative rhetoric aside, labor unions provide training, institute quality standards and work procedures.
The partnership system in the steamfitters and pipefitters unions could be emulated as pair programming is often much higher quality than code produced by lone programmers, or ad hoc hastily-assembled teams.
Think of it as a contracting outfit, only with the hefty cut that normally goes to the contract brokers -- going directly into your pension plan -- a REAL pension plan -- which you get to take with you from job to job.
Training, standards, a partner system, pensions, health plans. All the things we could get small businesses off the hook of having to provide.
And, union labor could actually undercut the likes of TekSystems and Adecco in a fair fight, lol.
Implementation is something else. What so-called 'idea people' don't realize is that without implementation, ideas are worthless. And you know what? Implementation is hard.
Starting a business is hard work!
The intangible benefits are pretty great, of course - freedom to set your own hours (clients permitting), freedom to set your own priorities, that sort of thing. That's all great. But the costs are pretty hefty. It's not just the money - though the money is a big problem too!
It's about the stress of getting a business off the ground. It's about taking half pay, living expenses, or no pay whatsoever while the business gets off the ground. It's about hiring someone new and wondering if they're actually a fuckup who's going to pull you down. It takes grit! And after the first year, you end up wondering if you did the right thing - if working for someone else might not seem so bad after all.
I used to guard my ideas jealously, but these days I don't even care. Go ahead, 'steal' my ideas. Then, whether you fail or succeed, I'll watch what you did. And if I have the opportunity... I'll give it my best shot to do it better.
"Just" quit smoking. "Just" exercise and lose weight. "Just" balance the budget. "Just" get off foreign oil. "Just" win baby.
"Just" is the word that betrays the orders of magnitude energetic difference between the running of the mouth and the actual doing of something.
I "had an idea" for Kinect over a decade ago. Having toyed with VR stuff and motion capture and the like I though "Man, it'd be really awesome to have a device that does visual and shape capture at the same time, to be able to get a full 3D capture of a world in to an editor." I personally was thinking something along the lines of an IR laser rapidly scanning a scene (like a laser shape capture device but larger).
Wow! Amazing! I so thought of it years before MS! I should be rich!!
Well... No.
All I did was think it was a neat idea. I had no fucking clue how to make it work. I just thought such a device would be great and would be doable, and had maybe a vague idea of what you might try. That is in no way shape or form something you could start development from or really anything unique. I'm sure tons of other people had the idea. What makes Kinect unique is that they got a team together, had engineers sit down and figure out how you might build such a thing, and do it cheaply, and now other people have figured out how to use data from it to reconstruct 3D scene data on a computer. The idea is not the hard part, the implementation is.
Even in purely idea fields, having a vague idea isn't amazing or worth anything, showing its worth is. Feynman didn't win the Nobel prize because he had an idea about how the spin of particles might relate to larger phenomena (such as the spin of plates, as he talks about in his book). He won it because he turned that idea, that spark, in to a theory of quantum electrodynamics that is detailed in its construction and makes extremely accurate predictions. Had he just said "Huh, it is interesting that the amount a plate wobbles when tossed is an integer ratio to how much it spins. Maybe that has something to do with the way particles work," well then nothing would have come of it. His work was all ideas, but the important part of the idea work was developing it in to a complete, useful, theory.
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.
Hey, it's us programmers who are supposed to bring all that expertise on the table, get paid next to nothing, listen to verbal abuse day in and out, and in the end have a battle about getting paid at all or not, and when you are winning that battle, they threaten to sue you on court for demanding to get paid for work. Not only that, but they expect that if you start a job and you spend 1hr doing it, you may not charge for it at the following days anymore, but even a 1000hr job has to be done on that initial stretch. If that's not enough, they hire you on a hourly basis, but expect you to work at project terms, thus denying any right to pay a dime before you accomplish 1500hr job to get paid for the 150hrs owed.
Sometimes they put the payments on ridiculous terms which they do anything to stop you from achieving so that there would be a snowball's chance in hell they'd have a bad conscious to not paying you.
And if you happen to get all of that right, client decides in the end "this idea was bad, so this implementation must suck and you suck as a coder, thus we don't need to pay you", stays quiet for couple months, then implement your alternative idea to get the system done on minimal work.
Ofc, for a programmer "rush" and "hurry" are just feelings and do not exist, and programmer's 24hr day is actually a 48hr day and programmers don't need to sleep. Programming neither is a job which requires special skills, knowledge or way of thinking. Programmers also work each day faster, so you can just keep increasing the load on a infinite loop. They are efficiently semi-robots as they have no emotions but are still capable of creative thinking.
They are also masters of all fields of knowledge, experienced veterans. All of them know marketing & advertising, business leadership, how any industry works and rocket engineers along with being programmers.
If you do happen to agree to pay them, you don't need to pay the local rates, because you can get programmers so much cheaper from far asian countries. Not only that, but they never have a problem accomplishing a 500hr task in 1 week.
But most of all, programmers are telepathic and knows what you want without telling you.
You know what's the irony here? This was all based on my experience. I've been always avid coder, done lots of cutting edge stuff, just for fun or to profit myself. I finally went to work as a programmer because i needed that income. Took me a bit over 1½years to burn out, then finally first proper vacation and few freelancing clients to stop completely and refusing even very high paid jobs. Now i only code for friends, and even that with extremely long schedules. The best thing was that the income was worse as a full time coder than as a logistics worker in a warehouse! I quite literally earned more as logistics worker during the brief 2months i temped there before going as a programmer.
The sad part is that i actually liked working as a programmer, and i liked to have a little bit of hurry. I was 110% fine with that, but the loads kept increasing faster, and owner of the company was a total asshole. He basically told me that it's a illusion that i'm in a hurry, after i had worked 3 months constant overtime and my workload had doubled or tripled during that, some of which i WANTED to do, but the amount of work started to become a bit too much and i became stressed out. Final stretch was the owner of company gave me bullshit written warning. He refused to give me even average industry salary based on the fact that he wanted to make me a partner in that company - Basicly asking money for shares of unknown value, so that i would work for smaller salary. I was earning so little than under 100euros spending to fix my home computer took 4+ months to get together that money, after all gas to get to work and back and food are more important costs.
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