> Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough?
> Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen engineers fail at a task. I've never seen an entire startup fail because of bad engineering -- they fail because they don't have paying customers, and the lack of paying customers is usually not because "our app doesn't work just right." Users will keep using clunky apps that solve a real problem for them, but they abandon apps that don't solve a real problem. > He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. That seems beside the point, doesn't it? We're not talking about whether implementation is completely unimportant, merely that the biggest lever is strategy (the idea itself, the marketing, the leadership that makes decisions about how to reach product-market fit) and not implementation. Let's say your friend is actually a semi-decent engineer. Would his app be 10% better if he were a 10% better engineer? Probably not. Yelp is ugly as sin but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Tinder chat is broken beyond belief but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Those companies have reached success through strategy and not implementation. You could make Yelp or Tinder 10% better from an engineering perspective, but that's not going to produce a 10% increase in users... I'd be surprised if it produced any growth in users at all actually.
Posted by eastbayjake on Jun 9, 2015, 11:49 PM
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Many devs love to shit on the guy from the 'I just want the exe.
Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost.
Resuming an extended-thinking session fails permanently with 400 "thinking blocks cannot be modified" (transcript stores thinking text as empty but keeps signat
I'll preface this with a statement that as a European I want European alternatives to succeed, and MS-owned GitHub to shrivel and disappear.
Yeah, but there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “we rounded a few sliders, and now the modal is a nightmare to use”.
I used to write a lot of native Windows corporate software in the 90's and 2000's and my standard login window was a floating draggable o...
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> Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough?
> Have you never seen engineers essentially fail at building a spec because they couldn't implement something well enough? I've seen engineers fail at a task. I've never seen an entire startup fail because of bad engineering -- they fail because they don't have paying customers, and the lack of paying customers is usually not because "our app doesn't work just right." Users will keep using clunky apps that solve a real problem for them, but they abandon apps that don't solve a real problem. > He keeps coming up with these ideas that are actually pretty decent, but he tries to build them himself (he's self taught but still doesn't really know what he's doing) and what he ends up with are things no one would ever, ever use twice. That seems beside the point, doesn't it? We're not talking about whether implementation is completely unimportant, merely that the biggest lever is strategy (the idea itself, the marketing, the leadership that makes decisions about how to reach product-market fit) and not implementation. Let's say your friend is actually a semi-decent engineer. Would his app be 10% better if he were a 10% better engineer? Probably not. Yelp is ugly as sin but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Tinder chat is broken beyond belief but people keep using it because it solves a real problem. Those companies have reached success through strategy and not implementation. You could make Yelp or Tinder 10% better from an engineering perspective, but that's not going to produce a 10% increase in users... I'd be surprised if it produced any growth in users at all actually.
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