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Do Tech Entrepreneurs Need To Know How To Code?
An anonymous reader writes "Learning to write code has become something of a trendy thing to do. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he intends to learn code this year. Estonia has recently announced a scheme with the aim of getting every 6-year-old in the Baltic state to learn programming skills. The demand has spawned a number of start-ups offering coding lessons. General Assembly, which teaches off-line courses, has recently opened up in London and is recruiting ahead of a launch in Berlin. On-line education site Codecademy landed $10 million to expand from its home base in New York. Zach Simms, the 22-year-old co-founder, said in an earlier interview with The Wall Street Journal that not everyone has to learn to code, but everybody 'needs to learn the notions of algorithms, realizing what you can use code for.' But do they?"
Coders are the pillar of our industry. We need more of them. Here, get Visual Studio and start coding today!
It's an increasingly vital part of how absolutely everything in the world works. It's the battleground for various political factions (everything from stuxnet to DRM to Anonymous hacks). It increasingly determines what you can and cannot do with the stuff you think you own.
Not knowing anything about programming or how it works is something I consider nearly as bad as illiteracy in our society.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Do people need to know how to program in C? No. Do they need to know how to think logically? It sure doesn't hurt. But there are other means of teaching formal logic; geometrical proofs are the standard for high school logic. I'm not sure that programming is necessarily the best way to go about it. The kids who have a natural knack for it will gravitate to it, so giving students the option as early as elementary or middle school is probably a fair thing to do. I don't think it should be a mandatory subject, especially at advanced levels.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I think I can generalize this. If you're doing a startup in the tech community, there's often something that's your bread and butter. There's gotta be something that sets you apart from a big guy clone otherwise you're not a startup, you're just another business trying to do business. This bread and butter is often complex otherwise someone else would already be doing this. If you're the leadership on a startup, the less you know about this core element of your startup, the riskier your venture is going to be.
... yeah I've been involved with rule based systems projects where it was pretty clear the people in charge of me didn't know the limitations of rule based systems. Back then, I'd draw out a functional flow block diagram for this system and show them the black box and explain to them why this was going to be trouble.
... but in the end I don't understand the science or the chemistry behind that process, it's probably going to die on the vine. Sure, software is a common misunderstanding for tech startups but it could just as easily be the frequency limits of modern RAM accesses or why a 700 Mhz ARM processor isn't gonna get the job done or how many points a resistive touch display can track at once accurately etc etc.
Coding is a common one because it's powerful. But your startup could just as easily depend on some hardware thing, like, say Fusion IO cards. And if the leaders of the startup don't understand the power and limitations of those cards, then you're in trouble. I think most of the time what I've seen ruin things inside a Fortune 500 company that does R&D that is supposed to mimic startups is that the leaders don't understand statistics and P-values and recall rates. Software is basically complex math so I guess you could say that was their misunderstanding of what software and "algorithms" could do but
If I started up a new drywall startup and claimed I had a new mixture of gypsum and lime pressed between two special kinds of paper done in a certain manner at a certain temperature making it more resistant to moisture, more durable, comparable in price, etc than the crap coming out of China
Basically if you don't understand the core concepts that your startup depends on and offers, you're gonna have a bad time.
My work here is dung.
If they were learning to architect software systems, that might be useful and help them to understand what's possible and what's not.
But learning to code doesn't help them at all, and is more likely to give them a false sense of the complexity of large software systems. He'll say stuff like "Hey, what's so hard about doing this, I can write a function to add this feature in 10 minutes, so go make it happen!", while the engineer is saying "But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"
TFA does not ask (or answer) "Do Tech Entrepreneurs Need To Know How To Code?" Rather it asks "Do nontechnical entrepreneurs of digital start-ups need to learn code?" (emph. added).
This really depends on which stage of a startup you're at. If you're in the garage building the prototype, yeah, you pretty much need to be R&D, which involves coding. If you're further along in the enterprise, perhaps raising money, perhaps building a team, perhaps concentrating on distribution or manufacturing, then being on the ground floor of R&D is much less important. Many founders turned CEO who started at ground zero developing products are ousted (bringing in an outside CEO or other manage) at later points in the life of their company simply because they are too focused on the minutia of product development and R&D, and haven't actually learned how to run and manage their organization.
Make no mistake, ideas are dime a dozen. Everyone has one, and everyone thinks their idea will make them a million dollars. The reason not everyone is a millionaire is that the conversion between idea and money is dependent much more on execution of the idea than the idea itself. If more entrepreneurs understood this instead of focusing on the product, there would be fewer failure stories to talk about. Now don't get me wrong, a good product is *very* important, but it's still a small part of the larger picture.
I see BadAnalogyGuy has an apprentice.
No, but you do need to understand how a toaster heats the bread in order to know what you can do with a toaster and how to set the toaster correctly.
'Coding' is syntax. Learning how to explain how to do something using a specific syntax. I think just about anyone can learn how to do that.
'Coding' is reading a spec and converting it to a specific syntax. I think just about anyone can learn how to do that.
'Programming' is taking a nebulous idea, breaking it down into a series of inter-related processing components, and then coding those processing components. It's being able to recognize if the processes as defined work as desired and if not, figuring out how which components do not work properly and correct them. It requires certain degrees of spatial skills depending on the complexity and number of processes being coded so that their inter-relationships can be understood.
Programming is a far more difficult thing to teach, because it requires someone to be able to develop a process where none already exists, or convert an existing process that is not computer-based, into a series of logical processing components and link them together to produce the desired results. It requires someone to step outside lines where everything is neatly defined and define their own instructions.
When so many people can't even follow directions on how to set the clock on their microwave oven, how the hell does anyone think they can learn to do anything but code what someone else has already written the instructions for.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The most successful tech entrepreneurs had significant technical skills. And that absolutely mattered - without those skills, they have no way of evaluating technical employees and applicants. If they weren't in charge of product development themselves, then they at least had to know who they should hire to run product development.
For example: Bill Gates was an extremely effective developer and architect (worth reading is Joel Spolsky writing about a time he met with Bill Gates). Larry and Sergei of Google were well-respected developers doing graduate work at Stanford. Steve Jobs wasn't at good at the technical stuff as Woz was, but he had tinkered with electronics and done technical work for Atari.
Many MBAs of the world would like to think that managers don't need to understand the details of their product line. But that's simply not true - the manager that understands the details will hire better people, make wiser decisions about how to accomplish tasks, and have a more realistic outlook of what the organization can do.
I am officially gone from
Peddled soda before becoming CEO of Apple. Everybody thought that his CEO expertise would carry over to any other kind of business. He didn't understand computers and thought he could beat the competition by turning macs into commodity computers and outmarketing the rest of the field. He very nearly put Apple out of business.
Modeling is a skill that's necessary to developers, and even to base coders it doesn't hurt. And it's also useful to entrepreneurs, especially when it comes to modeling flows of information and materials. They can delegate that skill, of course, but it's only a possibility in a large enough structure. To a small to medium company, having some skills in that matter is important. Owners of very small companies often manage to do that intuitively, but it only works to an extent, and can cause problems when they expand.
I sometimes half-jokingly state that if a company grows enough that it can have a second coffee machine, a full audit of the information system should be performed before said coffee machin is installed: it might disrupt informal communications between branches (who often happen around the coffee machine), which calls for a formalisation of communications before proceeding.
To sum up: management students have some courses in common with developers.
There's nothing like $HOME
Code is just syntax. Syntax that you use to feed your ideas into your compiler. Then you will start it and it probably won't run.
Code teaches you something important. An idea that doesn't work is bullshit. You can't blame anyone else, you just need to fix it and make it do the right thing.
Anyone who hasn't experienced this is not ready to be a member of a team and certainly not a leader.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I can put up drywall, paint my house, and upgrade the plumbing. But I can pay someone else to do it in less time than I can do it. After I was all in DIY mode, I started adding up the numbers, and it would have been more cost effective for me to get a second job as a part time software developer consultant than to do all the work on my house myself.
But my original post is not about producing a society of jack-of-all-trades. But it is about where should we draw the line at a well rounded education? Should it include Greek and Latin, or C and Java, or none of the above? I think there are compelling arguments for a number of positions on the subject.
I'm asking everyone one, where do they draw the line for "need", and why.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Fuck you, screwdrivers are the best!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
And if you've checked his plan at any length, after giving the wealthy a $6.5 billion that leaves a gaping $4 Billion deficit. You might also want to mention the elimination of the social safety net, putting Medicare recipients on a voucher program, eliminating the investment of government monies on education in general and carving Social Security back far enough to make sure baby boomers will need to live in packs to afford their dog food. His own Catholic Church said that his plans are "Unchristian" serving only the wealthy and viciously attacking the poor, homeless, and disenfranchised.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that folks on welfare could be put to good use, working to rebuild the American Infrastructure, seems only fair that if you're going to receive support that you earn that support by helping the nation grow and thrive. Call it a something for something program. I just don't believe that the guy with 12 homes and elevators in his 200 car garage, needs the government subsidy worse than the poor bastard in the rust belt with two kids whose only crime is his town's industry (owned by the clown with 12 cars) moved to China.
No.
It seems like the law has been confirmed yet again.
For those that are not aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
bullshit, I've never met a problem that couldn't be solved elegantly with just a hammer.
your screwdriver fancy-dancy crap is just adding complexity to problems. Screws are just odd-shaped nails after all!
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Jobs knew what was should be possible even though it had never been done. He also knew how to fix an idea and that real artists ship. How to work through issues and improve things, how to identify problems and identify potential solutions. He learned this from being an engineer at Atari and other experiences hacking as a young man. Jobs was not ignorant of reality, what could be done or how to do things, otherwise he would have failed completely, since he didn't know how to kiss the arse of foolish investors and make money off a profitable failure.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem