As the head of my university’s computer science department, I often get phone calls and emails from people who say they “have the next big idea.” To be honest, these calls are actually quite entertaining. The callers were passionate entrepreneurs obsessed with ideas they thought would revolutionize the Internet.
They think they can take down Google, or they can take down Facebook, or they can change the way we do business. Sometimes they come from outside the community, sometimes they are college students in our startup program, and they are usually business majors. The enthusiasm of these young entrepreneurs is contagious. They want to change the world, and they want me to help them.
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(Network diagram)
All they need is a programmer.
They need someone to translate ideas into PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, Java and Javascript. These entrepreneurs only know what they need. So, they asked me if I could help him find one or two computer science majors to join their program and do these things.
Most of these projects will never get a computer science student to start. Of course, there are many reasons for this, for example, students are busy with their lives and studies. Most computer science students have jobs that they enjoy and that directly pay them. Small as they may be, these tangible rewards are more attractive to most students than a blank check with an uncertain future. It’s not enough to impress anyone, it’s just the “ego” of the entrepreneur who created the idea and rushed to make it a reality.
Entrepreneurs who don’t interact with computer science students or other programmers call me again and again, hoping to hear good news. The younger the entrepreneur, the more likely he is to lose confidence. They seem to expect everyone to be as excited about their ideas as they are (young pollyanna!). . Part of me always hoped that they would find someone to help them turn their ideas into reality. It’s an exciting process and they can all benefit from it.
Of course, they never expected to learn how to program on their own.
Just a little while ago, I tweeted about getting those calls. Andrei Savu got back to me and summed up what I was seeing very nicely:
@wallingf I’m sorry that people like them treat programmers like commodities. Product = execution! = Original ideas.
In a long article I wrote recently, the value of a product comes from a combination of thought and execution. Ideas alone, or execution alone, are of little value. You need a combination of the two.
Many “thinking people” tend to think that most value comes from their thoughts. Programmers are just commodities, taken off the shelf and cleaned out of detail. Programming is a trivial problem, isn’t it?
On the other hand, some programmers tend to think that most of the value comes from executing ideas. But when you don’t have an idea, you can’t do anything. So my friends and I sometimes taste sweet and sour chicken and lament our “lost wealth.” Just kidding, of course. We didn’t really lose anything, because we didn’t gain anything. We are missing one crucial ingredient, an idea. And there’s no time machine or other way to go back in time.
I still hope that some people with ideas will learn how to program themselves, or will learn to program themselves, so that they can implement their ideas themselves. In the same way, they recognize the extraordinary persistence it takes for an idea to take shape. Learning how to program used to be one of the most difficult things to do with a computer. Unfortunately, not anymore. It seems that the most inescapable part of using a computer these days is communicating with people you don’t know and watching videos.
Oh, and imagine that you’ve discovered the “next big thing” that could disrupt Google or Facebook. Occasionally I feel the urge to tell entrepreneurs who call me that their idea is unlikely to change the world. But I didn’t. I didn’t do it for two reasons. One, they didn’t call me for advice. Second, every once in a while a Microsoft or A Google or a Facebook comes along and does change the world. How am I supposed to know which of the myriad ideas will actually change the world? If my partner and I had gone back to 2000 and told our young, handsome friends about Facebook, would we then have had enough foresight to write about it? I seriously doubt it.
How do we know which ideas will change the world? All we can do is write programs, do our best to make the product what people need and want, and then take care of ourselves. Programming is the missing piece for people with ideas. They’ve done a pretty good job of finding ideas. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if more people could put their own ideas into practice.