Skip to main content

If You're An "Ideas Guy", You're Doing It Wrong

There's a disturbing trend that I'm seeing more and more of lately in Silicon Valley, and it's the commoditization of engineering talent in the minds of non-engineers. I'm not sure what they're teaching in business schools these days, but I keep meeting freshly-minted MBAs who "have a great idea and just need some devs to implement it". So lemme just throw this out there:

If you're an "ideas guy", and "just need a couple of engineers" to build your company, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

See, for instance, this recent TechCrunch article which blithely implies that engineers are "coding themselves into irrelevance", and before long, "the business founder [will have] the advantage that today's technical founders enjoy." Huh? Guess what - in healthy companies, it's not such an adversarial relationship. If it is, then you're doing something wrong.

There is no greater turn-off to a prospective tech co-founder or engineering hire than insinuating that they are nothing more than a replaceable tool. Last fall, I even flew to Korea to tell an auditorium full of engineering students that they are not tools, but instead are the engines of innovation for their future companies. Ideas are a dime a dozen - if you can't execute on them, then you are the replaceable part, not the devs you're looking to hire. A good experiment for any company is to switch roles for a day and see who is more productive - the "business guy" given a codebase and a problem to solve, or the "engineer" given a full day of "product strategy review" meetings. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Lest I be misconstrued, I'd like to point out that some of my best and most respected friends in the Valley and elsewhere are "business guys" (and girls), but what sets them apart is that they know their shortcomings (the same holds true for good engineers), they're willing and excited to learn about the tech world they do business in, and they treat engineers as partners rather than pawns. As a result, their teams are stronger than the sum of their parts. They have fostered an environment of mutual respect, where ideas can flourish and roles are not necessarily so artificially constrained. If you're a "business guy" that's just starting out, or you've been struggling to find good engineers, maybe it's time to reflect on your approach rather than decrying "how hard it is to find talent".

Remember: Engineers are people, not tools or commodities. Treat them well, and together you will build something great.




Comments

  1. Unknown10:04 PM

    +1

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1:38 AM

    I'm sorry Darren, but I couldn't disagree more. Engineering is a marketable and commoditized trait. I can pay $X for Y engineering hours. Different engineers have different skill levels, but engineering work is something you can buy and this is completely independent from the ability to discover and execute on good ideas. There are as many bad ideas that come from engineers as from non engineers and if you look back at the most prominent founders of the last three or four decades you will find that they never finished an engineering degree at all and/or most of the engineering work was not done by them at all.

    I don't know where this myth of "only engineers can come up with good ideas for anything that requires engineering work" came from, perhaps Google, but it's very silly. Maybe brick layers believe they are the only ones who have good idea for "successful" buildings?

    ReplyDelete
  3. igorsales7:19 AM

    I almost completely agree with "Unknown".

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

영어가 모국어인 사람들은 왜 한국어를 배우기가 어려운 이유

이 포스트는 내 처음 한국어로 블로그 포스트인데, 한국어에 대하니까 잘 어울린다. =) 자, 시작합시다! 왜 외국사람에게 한국어를 배우기가 어렵다? 난 한국어를 배우고 있는 사람이라서 이 문제에 대해 많이 생각하고 있었다. 여러가지 이유가 있는데 오늘 몇 이유만 논할 것이다. 1. 분명히 한국어 문법은 영어에 비해 너무 많이 다른다. 영어는 “오른쪽으로 분지(分枝)의 언어"라고 하는데 한국어는 “왼쪽으로 분지의 언어"이다. 뜻이 무엇이나요? 예를 보면 이해할 수 있을 것이다. 간단한 문장만 말하면 (외국어를 말하는 남들은 간단한 문장의 수준을 지낼 수가 약간 드물다), 간단한 걸 기억해야 돼: 영어는 “SVO”인데 한국어는 “SOV”이다. “I’m going to school”라고 한국어로는 “저는 학교에 가요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I’m school to go”이다. 두 언어 다르는 게 목적어와 동사의 곳을 교환해야 한다. 별로 어렵지 않다. 하지만, 조금 더 어렵게 만들자. “I went to the restaurant that we ate at last week.” 한국어로는 “전 우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당에 또 갔어요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I we last week went to restaurant to again went”말이다. 한국어가 왼쪽으로 분지 언어라서 문장 중에 왼쪽으로 확대한다! 이렇게 좀 더 쉽게 볼 수 있다: “전 (우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당)에 또 갔어요”. 주제가 “전"이고 동사가 “갔다"이고 목적어가 “우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당"이다. 영어 문장은 오른쪽으로 확대한다: I (S) went (V) to (the restaurant (that we went to (last week))) (O). 그래서 두 숙어 문장 만들고 싶으면 생각속에서도 순서를 변해야 된다. 2. 첫 째 점이니까 다른 사람을 자기 말을 아라들게 하고 싶으면, 충분히...
Post a Comment
Read more

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther...
5 comments
Read more

"Gangnam Style" English Translation

I finally got around to looking up the lyrics to Psy's "Gangnam Style" last night. I couldn't find any English translations that I liked, so I decided to make my own. Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean. It's not my first language. It's not even my second or third language. But I did used to live in Gangnam, and the Internets abound with dictionaries, so I decided to give it a go. Incidentally, this is also my first foray into Korean-English translation. The translators out there will know - translation is as much art as science. If you translate directly, you end up with overly awkward constructions. But if you vary too much from the direct translation, you risk losing the original intent. So, in some places below, I've taken some poetic license to make the translation sound better. For example, "놀 땐 노는 여자" literally means "a girl who plays when it's time to play", but I changed it to "a girl who knows how to get down"...
4 comments
Read more