Your analogy is apt. What you (like a lot of programmers) fail to realize is that selling a painting is extraordinarily difficult.

They didn't coin the phrase "starving artist" for fun.

Good question.

One of the things I do is ask potential employees to HONESTLY list several specific things they DISLIKE and/or HATE about our business (either the business model or the actual implementation.) Every business has warts, so it shouldn't be too hard to find some. If the business in question is a complete startup or is in 'stealth mode', I ask them to list things they dislike about the general industry we're operating in.

I want to hire employees that are honest and will work to improve our business. Asking this question helps me screen for brown-nosers, it leads to the obvious follow-up question of how they would change things to improve them, and it also really gives me an insight into how they think. It also shows me how much research they've done and how much industry knowledge they have. I've actually created new positions for people based on their answers to this question...it can be really enlightening. You just have to be genuine in wanting to hear their answers and you have to have a thick skin.

This is a bit like saying "I have a great idea for a painting. Will you paint it for me, and then give me half the money you get from selling it?"

for sufficiently vague definitions of "idea".

If you're not planning on paying, and want to create a team, you'd better learn how to program. I was in your same position several months ago. I tried looking for programmers, and those that I found were turned off by the fact that I had no programming knowledge/experience. So, I got fed up and decided to learn how to program. I started with Python, dabbled in some SQL, and am currently trying to refine my Django skills. Time, dedication, and documentation is all it really required. It's not that bad.

In the Gmail Genius vs Clueless Manager comparison, I think it's more apt to say that the genius can traverse the tree and 'drill down' where necessary, applying the most effective changes at the necessary level of detail. The Clueless Manager is always stuck at the highest levels of abstraction, and he can only work with very blunt objects. The point is that the largest gains can sometimes come from optimizing disk-seek speeds, and being able to recognize (and correct) this is an advantage over only being able to talk about performance in generalized terms.

Well, not too long ago I posted my dilemma about me being very business oriented and having design skill, and still not being able to find programmers as they were turned off.

And the majority of the replies I received were ones telling me to learn how to program.

Just because I'm learning to code doesn't mean, however, that I am tossing my other skills away. I find that I have a much much much better understanding of the mechanics behind apps and that at the very least, i'll be able to connect on a much deeper level with another programmer if I were to assemble a team and not take a significant programming position.

You're right, perhaps he may turn out to be an awful coder, but at the very least, establishing a common thread of communication by which a programmer can relay his concerns to a designer or a marketer, and for them to understand, in my opinion, is pretty valuable.

It may be that the solution to this problem is not to reform the elite colleges, but to go around them, so that they are no longer the gatekeepers they once were.

That's what happens with technology, anyway. You don't beat the incumbents; you make them irrelevant.

It'd be really great if PG would consider doing an alpha release of Arc sometime. To me, there appears to be a mini-Lisp revolution going on right now, largely thanks to PG & reddit. It'd be a shame to let that energy dissipate as people grow tired of waiting for it to come out.

I know the excitement that I have for Arc isn't as much the "100 year language" issue as much as the need to have strong leadership for a Lisp. I think that this is evident by the difficulties the various CLs have when introducing new functionality to the language vs. a package, or the whole R6RS fiasco that's been driving the Schemers mad.

Even if someone isn't cut out to be a great programmer, it will help a lot to have done some programming. Jobs wasn't a hacker on the scale of Wozniak, but it helped him a lot to have done some technical work. He was not just a suit.

Certain things in this article indicate that it was not written by a serious man. The confusion between the words 'effected' and 'affected'. The reference to 'capitalists' as an identifiable class of people. The assumption that America lacks "the ability to produce products that the rest of the world wants to buy", apparently irrespective of their cost. Gratuitous references to 'obese' Americans.

I want to make two general points in response.

1.) Many things in Economics have two sides to them, and exchange rates are one such thing. Yes, a weaker dollar means those who hold dollars are, effectively, poorer. OTOH, a weaker dollar makes our exports more attractive to the rest of the world, and will redress the trade imbalance that the professional doom-and-gloomers are always on about. If you're in business, selling to the rest of the world, a weaker dollar is _good_. See, for instance, all the whining about 'artificially' low pegs for the Yuan and Yen.

2.) The _current_ (floating) exchange rates represent the aggregate wisdom of the market on the question of _future_ exchange rates. If the dollar was "obviously" going to depreciate further, it would depreciate now, as traders looked to short it. Predicting deviations from the current market rates is simple speculation. If that's your bag, knock yourself out, but don't act like the future is transcendentally obvious. That sort of talk is simple kookery.

"Acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so."

-- PG, circa Nov 2005

:)