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So you "just need a hacker", huh?
- LMG 18y agoI Need a HACKER !! We do sale hacking software! Gmail Yahoo Hotmail IOL Contact us to marketing.lmg@gmail.com
- LMG 18y agoWe do sale hacking software! Gmail Yahoo Hotmail IOL Contact us to marketing.lmg@gmail.com
- dirtyrevenge 18y agoi need some one to hack my old myspace and give me the password its crzy_bytch_92@myspace.com youy can contact me at desirae_davis_92@yahoo.com thats my new myspace
- earle 18y agostubborn
- earle 18y agothe immediate downmods of my original comment of "stubborn" seems to be further testament to the overall quality in capacity for this site lately. the authors comments are emotionally loaded opinions that are quite frankly, a result of immaturity and frustration. so my original comment stands: stubborn.
- davidw 18y agoIt was not a great comment, but I'd also like to say that we've had, if not quite a tradition... many of us have encouraged people not to downvote beyond -1 or 0 for comments that are not "really bad" (racist, outright insults, spam, that kind of thing).
- brk 18y agoBrilliant!
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- brk 18y agoProbably a valid assessment. I also think his opinion, while strongly stated, is very valid though. There a more "good ideas" than people to implement them. Thinking up an idea, writing a business plan, and securing some funding is (IMO and IME) easier that actually putting that good idea into practice and finding all the little edge-cases, never-thought-of-thats, and such along the way.
- carpal 18y agoWell, funding is a different matter. If a beef-headed M.B.A. actually has some funding, they might actually be worth listening to. However, 99% of the time they don't have funding, they've (at best) got "strong interest from investors" or some such.
- brk 18y agoI wouldn't get distracted by funding, especially angel funding, which is what you'll typically find at the very early stages. Beef-headed MBA's went to school with other beef-heads, and might know a few people who know a few people. Scraping up $1M is not terribly difficult when you know a few people. Put another way, one of my favorite quotes is "A fool and his money are soon venture capital".
- pius 18y agoI can understand it. While I don't necessarily subscribe to the "ideas are worthless" meme, I definitely don't believe that "hackers" are commodities either.
- ejs 18y agoThis sounds just like a zed shaw rant, in fact I think he says the exact same thing in some article. For the most part this is usually true (although abrupt), it is often hard to break it to people that their 'awesome idea' really isn't worth anything.
- carpal 18y agoPretty much any solid rant sounds like a Zed Shaw rant.
- run4yourlives 18y agoSounds as young as he looks. My advice: Never pass up a good opportunity.
- mixmax 18y agoIt's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO. While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need because hacking something together happens to be the first step to creating a great company. The key insight is that no great company was made by only one guy. It takes both great hackers, great marketing people, great CEO's and great sales people. Hell, maybe you even need a great janitor... So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who needs who.
- webframp 18y agotraditionally the hackers have been the most undervalued in the whole equation.
- mixmax 18y agoYes they have, probably because hackers are the only ones in the equation who don't need to be good at selling, bullshitting and staking out territory. Hackers should try and become better at selling themselves and knowing their worth. This, however, is an art - selling yourself well is a very subtle and hard thing to get right. Underdo it and you won't get results. Overdo it and you'll sound like a pretentious asshole.
- kingkongrevenge 18y agoPhilip Greenspun wrote convincingly about how programmers are under valued because they fail to treat programming as a proper profession. They don't dress and otherwise present themselves professionally. They fail to interface professionally with customers and analysts as a doctor or lawyer would. Programmers themselves tend to demand a management style that treats them as a cog in the machine, where they are fed detailed requirements and produce output for others to deal with. The nature of programming work is not so far removed from what a corporate lawyer or financial analyst does. Yet programmers have a much different public image. I think it's fair to say programming attracts certain idiosyncratic personalities that affect the general perception of the work. On the same theme as the grandparent post, don't undervalue the soft touch. There are people who bring to the table little more than that they're nice and likeable. I've seen such people in analyst roles responsible for retaining or creating substantial business.
- alex_c 18y agoI can't help but wonder whether this was inspired by the Facebook dev forums.
- dangrover 18y agoI liked this rant, immature as it might be. Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it. Before I even hear their idea, I do a simple mental calculation. First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition to being a programmer. They better at least match that and have actually worked on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves. The person needs to be as competent in their supposed field as I am in mine. The value that people who are good at selling and networking bring is incalculable, I'd kill for a co-founder that could bring that. But they have to be as crazy and devoted to it as I am towards my coding, or else it just can't work. Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- tim2 18y agoSend them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate. Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.
- SwellJoe 18y agoI wouldn't work for rates "competitive" with those at eLance or Rent-A-Coder. I've done projects through those sites, and despite explicitly stating, "Don't bother with lowball offers--we're looking for good work, not low prices. We are developers, and we will be judging your experience and code harshly." I still got bids of 150 bucks for a project that I would have billed a weeks worth of hours for. They, of course, would do a horrible job, and not even worth that much...but you shouldn't try to compete on price with those folks.
- tim2 18y agoIn theory, but we're talking about guys who think that you love programming so much that you'll just work for some of their worthless equity.
- ten-seven 18y agoLots of people are Jacks of All Trades, but masters of none. Take, for example, the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen movie franchise. Everybody had skills and roles to play. It wasn't possible for one person to be in all places all the time, nor was it possible for a single person to perform each job. This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.
- DocSavage 18y agoI heard a Hollywood producer reference Ocean's Eleven in the same way. Moviemaking requires a ton of skills spread out over a large number of specialists. So what if the author has a business degree. Does he have mad business skills?
- timr 18y agoYeah. It also wasn't possible to knock out all of the power in Las Vegas with an EMP bomb, to lift a mansion covertly with a 12-man team in one night, or to "hack" into a casino's "security system" by clipping little tiny things to a few network cables. That's because those were movies.
- mynameishere 18y agoThe problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs. Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
- carpal 18y agoThere are two main differences: 1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie). 2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.
- carpal 18y agoI went a bit more in-depth here: http://subwindow.com/articles/12 http://subwindow.com/articles/12 It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- frouaix 18y agoIs Hacker News the new slashdot or what? How come this entry made it to the top of the page? And a note for Erik Peterson: some future day when you discover that you need some help for something you don't quite understand fully, you might regret having written that blog entry.
- edw519 18y agoI sure hope he doesn't need as many lines of code to build something as he needs cuss words to make a point.
- ardit33 18y agoWhat a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of the company. If you have an idea, and can't programm you can: 1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital. 2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity. If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream. See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere. As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.
- ardit33 18y agoAh, and a lot of people mention Jobs as a non-hacker, which is simply not true. He was a hacker, but with great businness sense. "Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14] In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."
- tptacek 18y agoCommenters here talk as if no successful business was ever started by a sharp businessperson who hired software developers. Clearly, many such businesses exist.
- daniel-cussen 18y agoI know of businesses who look like they were started by businesspeople who hired hackers because the hackers were later ousted (like digg). The businessperson displaced the hacker after the fact. Can you think of any businesses were there where this clearly didn't happen? Can you think you any successful software company started by a businessperson who paid consulting fees to thoughtworks or IBM, set up a booth at a CS department to recruit techies, or paid a headhunter?
- tptacek 18y agoAmazon.
- tptacek 18y agoAlso, Intuit.
- tptacek 18y agoAnd, Wikipedia. And YouTube. Can Dick Costello code? I can't remember (he's a really nice guy, though). No? Feedburner.
- nostrademons 18y agoJeff Bezos was a hacker. He didn't call himself one because he also had significant business & financial skills, but he worked as a quant for D.E. Shaw. D.E. Shaw is the Google of hedge funds; anyone there is more than a match for the Ph.Ds at Google. Bezos's degree was in EECS, and his childhood projects would easily have gotten him into YCombinator. Intuit was cofounded by Tom Proulx, who wrote the first version of Quicken himself. Scott Cook gets most of the credit because of his determination, but without either of them, the company wouldn't exist. It certainly was not an outsourced startup. Wikipedia I'll grant you. Though the concept of wikis was invented by Ward Cunningham, who certainly was a hacker. YouTube was started by 3 ex-PayPal employees. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were certainly hackers, Chad Hurley was more design. They built the initial version themselves.
- Tichy 18y agoStuff like that makes me wonder if I should start a "Never ever work with that person, no matter what"-list.
- Tichy 18y agoRuby book: 30$ - Rails book: 30$ - Never have to work with arrogant hackers again: priceless!
- pg 18y agoThis would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be. Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
- wumi 18y agowith the considerable amount of traffic that HN can drive to a link/ blog (and such a specific audience) any thought that the "recently arrived users" may be gaming HN?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- chaostheory 18y agoThe link itself maybe an embarrassment, but the discussions surrounding it on YC are somewhat less emotional and pretty interesting; and they do touch upon the reasons why it happens (particularly the thread started by mixmax)
- LMG 18y agoI Need a HACKER !! We do sale hacking software! Gmail Yahoo Hotmail IOL Contact us to marketing.lmg@gmail.com
- TrevorJ 18y agoAs a non-coder who is cursed with a brain that comes up with a constant flow of creative ideas that my fingers can't execute, you've just shattered my world. Screw you. Oh, and do you mind if I borrow some of your old reference manuals, I just decided to learn how to program. ;-)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Harj 18y agothis presents a rather binary view of things - either you're a hacker or you're an arrogant MBA. there are plenty of people who aren't hackers but they certainly understand tech and aren't beef-headed MBA's. mitch kapor and joe kraus never wrote a line of code.
- admoin 18y agoI think the author has a point, but I think hackers are guilty of similar behavior regarding legal and finance expertise, both of which are critically important in keeping and profiting (respectively) from your hacking. I think it's really just pretty self-evident that people will overvalue their own field of knowledge, and consider other fields to be less important/valuable than they actually are.
- joeter 18y agoThis sounds as hysterical as if someone told me, "If you don't know Mandarin, don't do any business with/in China!" Delegation of responsibility is a concept of pivotal importance for any entrepreneur to grasp if they want to go very big. Isn't Richard Branson dyslexic?
- gruseom 18y agoSomeone (aswanson?) posted a question I thought was really good, and was replying to with the following. But when I hit "Add Comment", it seemed the post was deleted in the meantime. I'm going to put my reply up anyway 'cause I spent 5 minutes writing it :) The question was: how did the situation get this way, with creative and knowledgeable people being told what to do by often clueless managers and MBAs, who have no particular expertise? It seems irrational and it's not obvious why the world would work this way. Jerry Weinberg, who was one of the first few computer programmers in the world and later became famous as a writer, was asked this once. He said that the first few generations of programmers (up to 1970 or so) were arrogant towards customers, businesspeople, and managers. Programmers were so scarce, and computing itself so unfamiliar and scary, that programmers expected and were given a kind of godlike deference, which they abused. After a while, customers got angry about the fact that they didn't have a say, were treated like idiots, and given stuff that didn't work very well. Eventually, Weinberg said, this led to a backlash whereby managerial control was imposed on programmers. The effects of this backlash persist today. I don't claim that this is the only answer to the question, but it sounds like a piece of the puzzle, at least in the software business. The thing about the backlash is that it also failed, leading to the irrational situation the original questioner described. Perhaps the current generation of entrepreneur hackers can be seen in this context, as programmers who have creative control, but also really care about building what customers want.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]