Bad programmers, bad designers
In an essay entitled, The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, Paul Graham lists Mistake #6 as Hiring Bad Programmers:
When I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds--almost impossibly hard in fact--because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.
I couldn't agree more, especially if your startup depends on technology for survival. What's more, if you're an online company, design is integral to the equation.
37Signals' Jason Fried says it well while pondering why companies with lots of VC cash still churn out bad designs:
Money can buy talent but it can't buy you passion, motivation, or curiosity.
Make sure you can code and design brilliantly within the walls of your startup. Let your competitors outsource these things and increase their costs, because outsourced code will never be able to compete with passionate code.
Hrush
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Reader Comments (6)
Nope.At first insatnce I will make sure to have the good programmmers at my firm.If they turned out to be bad,then there is only two options for me either refine them thru better process or opt for better hands.
Its not wise enough to get the thought proved and get your business loose...
A lot of it depends on *question framing*. Are you trying to solve a:
1. technology problem (think ITA)
2. a travel problem i.e. the web is but another medium to sell tickets
3. getting a person from point A to point B problem
If it's #1, then technology becomes core, not so much for the others,
And being an unabashed Paul graham fanboy, I have to say, the variance in marketing, sales, service, support, etc is not as much as in developing software -- where you can get orders of magnitude more productivity by hiring smart hackers and giving them equity;-)
Cheers.
* Does the code work? Does it work without needing constant restarts and monitoring?
* Is the code concise?
* Is the code's syntax elegant?
* Is the code easy to read and maintain?
* Can the code be easily extended to deliver new functionality?