True. And once their product hits the market, if ever gets there, they don't thrive.

Prior to launch they are sooooo in love with their idea that they are meticulous about features all the while thinking they're smarter than the market.

They don't understand and appreciate the value of execution. Ideas are easy. Execution - because it involves people as well as adapting to change - is 10x harder.

Yes, those people exist. Unfortunately, that bias will ultimately undermine them, but they'll never admit it.

It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all about what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, loves it.

The trick is to not start off by saying "It'll never work." That slams doors shut, right away.

It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

That will often result in changes being made, by the "idea person," as the plans are laid. We will also try to create test harnesses and prototypes. These often end up, with the idea person going "Hmm...it seemed like a good idea, but it doesn't work the way I wanted."

It's slow and painful, but works.

I could be a lot more of a pain in the butt than I am, as I have a lot of leverage, but one of my goals is to help others on the team (including a young CEO) to learn how to make ship software.

If I were working on my own, I probably would have shipped, eighteen months ago.

No one is making a dime. It’s a nonprofit effort.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal. Chances are, you're not the first person to observe the problem and an opportunity to capitalize on it and there may be good reason no one has yet (its economically infeasible given current understanding, resources, and value people see in it).

The trick is to hold their hand and walk them through a feasibility analysis. Given infinite time and money, I'm confident I can arrive at pretty much any solution or at least a useful approximation that's an improvement on where we currently stand, so we start there and walk backwards. How much time do we really have, how much money do we really have. What's your appetite for risk within those bounds. Let's start talking about some tradeoffs of what you want to see and what I think we might be able to actually achieve.

In my experience, they've identified a want. Either their want or a want they think the market has.

It's not until further analysis do they / you / we get to root need(s). This is why (allegedly) so many "IT projects" fail. The client got what they wanted...not what they needed.

Socratic Software development is the way to go.

The same reason why menial workers earn so little relative to how hard they work.

It would appear that both credit and money flow to those who enable things to happen rather than those who execute.

In top places though, it’s often the case that trainees have an idea, get shut down by PI, trainee demonstrates project can work, then PI changes mind.

Also in science, the usual progress of a project is often PI has an idea, trainees explores the idea, finds an even better idea, PI says great now write the paper.

But I agree with you in the sense that PIs act as the “quality control” or “selection process” whereby ideas get culled and refined. And their scientific taste is non fungible.

I'm reminded of reading about a Lisp machine company that ran into the ground because it was managed by techies. Their tech may have been great but their marketing and business skills were very arguably what killed the company.

Some MBAs are dumbasses. Some are brilliant business people. Some of them actually have tech skills and have been writing software longer than you’ve been alive. This is true for many degrees.

I don’t know how some of the anti-MBA commenters think it works: A smart software engineer goes off to business school, gets an MBA in addition to his undergrad technical degree/experience, and now… what? He’s somehow dumber? How does that work? Only on HN.

Now, if you already had relevant experience, then went and took the MBA course, and were able to identify when to lean on which, great! But, of course, part of that education is telling you that you don't NEED that experience in the first place, and if it and MBA principles disagreed, you should rely on the MBA principles.

So, if you took the course truly to heart, then, well, yes, you would be somewhat "dumber", so long as you define that as "unable to make correct decisions."

There was no expectation of being "air dropped" into an industry, and in fact, industry recruiters looked for candidates who already had prior experience when picking students for interviews and hiring. The students who had no relevant experience for the industry they were recruiting for (e.g. ex-Peace Corps or mgmt consultant looking to transition to tech or industry in general) were the ones who struggled to find roles. Your assumptions about what an MBA education entails are incredibly far off the mark.

But there’s one type of ideas person I’m thrilled to work with. Someone with deep and successful experience in sales. The head of sales at my company is also relatively product oriented and boy, he just has a knack for what customers want.

In general, I think many engineers can do some product management. We can figure out basic accounting and finance. But the idea of making a cold call to sell dental software, or chasing down school principals at an education conference is almost as foreign to most software engineers as CS is to most sales folks.

Salesperson + engineer = superpowers

(When I worked for a long-ago hardware company, system engineers (SEs) were pretty much the equivalent of SAs where I am currently.

Being the engineering contractor to SA organization is daunting to a programmer, but rather rewarding.

Right but how much of that is because humans don't scale? With the AI, if it can do a thing well enough it can do it 100 000 times per day.

In my mind, having individuals and small self managed teams go off and do whatever they feel drawn to do is exactly how a good company is run. - So long as those teams and individuals talk to (& seek advice) from the rest of the company when their work has impacts outside the team. The book Reinventing Organizations by Laloux talks about this a lot, and how it works in some companies today.

The reason it doesn't happen more is that upper management doesn't trust their employees and they don't feel in control when people just do things.

All those jobs do is push emails rewording other emails to other people pushing email.

I feel like eventually every company will have a single a figurehead that’s fed instructions but believes it’s original thought and is told by the AI what a great idea they just had all day long.

A bit like the Captain from Wall-E.

Not the full job, but it can probably be built right now.

Anyway, the good version of those three are completely different, and add a ton of value on very different places. I think they are rare enough that many people don't ever meet one of them.

Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than quantity?

He's still expected to put in the same amount of time, but now he has to expend brain power the entire time.

Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time.

As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop.

Reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but the situation with software is a bit different.

Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space.

Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.

Asking a human manager for anything is many orders of magnitude more frightening. It's not that I don't have questions! I have many, of which a lot are dumb questions, questions that I should be able to figure out without help.

Say i'm pondering taking a day off, with the human I would make up my mind, pick the day and ask for the day off. With a bot I would ask which day would be ideal before making up my mind. A human manager would think you've gone insane if you asked 20 such questions. You either want a day off, you don't or you say nothing.

I might like a different brand of coffee while we are trying to meet the deadline. I'm sure that question is going to go down well with an overworked human manager.

With people asking a question is never just asking a question.

Like with any job there is a sub set of tasks better done by a machine.

I never realised Bullshit jobs was written by an actual academic.

It's not a new idea.

I think it's an underestimated aspect of why CEO's get paid the big bucks.

They're paid money to not let this stupidity happen.

On their side, the engineers might even ask it “summarize my tickets and come up with an optimistic, business-friendly high level storyline.”

The only time I see synergies is when we talk about what task to take on next and why.

(which has been major time sink of engineering managers that I know).

Like when the brick of cheese comes out of the freezer with an obvious bend?

Or like when I don’t make a nice square cut and my sandwich is cheesier in some spots than others?

This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

There's a whole industry here in America that re-shores programming contracts. They know they can't underbid Indian/foreign body shops so they just wait a few months and call back the companies who went with cheaper programmers. If the company is still around it's generally a complete re-write.

Yes there are these "idea people" who don't have any clue about business side and don't have any clue about technical side and in the end don't even have the right connections or business network. But they think they can make it because they have an idea(TM). These could basically play lottery and outcome would be the same they might make it but chances are 1:1000000 at best.

Then there are these business people who have the right connections and have understanding of niche/business they are in .. that need technical help to execute their idea and these are worth their weight in gold.

Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.

I've met my fair share as well. Jobs copycats too!

The trick is always to ask them how much they can raise, and do so assuming they raised successfully in the past and that they know VCs.

Either the conversation gets really interesting, or they clam up real quick!

They don't need to have the ability to raise anything in a B2B setting, if they can answer the alternative question:

"How many customers have you personally signed up for previous software sales".

I'll happily partner with someone who has profitably sold B2B software - having a list of existing contacts in existing companies as well as solid experience going through the entire sales channel is, to me, just as valuable as extracting money from VCs, because I'd rather have the money from customers than money from VCs.

I met a pair of such idea guys once, they ran their own idea company. Their specialty was brand consulting and online marketing, but if that involved something as menial as web development they'd help with that too. The thing that made me bristle was whenever they talked about the feasibility of software solutions for their ideas, they said "Oh, we'll run that through the machine." You know, as if their software team was just a big machine that ingested ideas and spit out code.

Their idea company is no longer around. One of them decided that he'd rather design hiking boots than anything computer related; the other is a head of UI design at Apple.