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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?"
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.
One time I was writing some code to control hardware and the boss wanted it to watch for a condition and then alert the supervisors. I thought it was a good idea and asked him what symptoms defined this condition he wanted to watch for. He said "just let the computer figure it out." I don't think I ever got him to understand the computer doesn't think but just follows rules and until the rules are defined the computer won't know what to do. I ended up making a guess for rules and kept tweeking as I watched for false positives and negatives.
A entrepreneur needs to understand how computes work and how algorithms work or it's going to be a cluster.
Dyslexics Untie!
or vagina...
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.