Programmers who claim to be business savvy are snake oil salesman
Filed under: Software | 3 Comments »As soon as a “programmer” comes to me and claims to be `business savvy` I immediately get a little suspicious. It’s very similar to someone naming themselves as `social media expert`. It’s just bullshit. Often time the first thing I think is “shit, is this guy going to put his code where his mouth is?”
For a lot of the social media stuff and the business stuff, it’s very domain-specific. This is why startups that hire a large amount of executive types are dumb and will often fail – they all have to “shake things up” and don’t actually add that much to the bottom line. Plus, business isn’t enough of a definitive skillset to be very transferrable between different types of careers and organizations. This is why Business majors do so badly on post-graduate testing.
The larger problem with this whole I’m a business man and programmer is that it’s meaningless. In reality, I think most smart people, and especially engineers, are capable of making smart day to day business decisions when properly informed. It’s just that good engineers don’t have the time.
Now if you have an engineering background and you have run a few startups and enjoy being a CEO-type and want to continue doing that, good for you. I love working for engineer CEOs.
But if you are an engineer who just wants to claim he is business savvy for whatever reason, do us all a favor and just concentrate on being a good engineer and use your common sense for everything else. There’s more than enough ways your organization can likely use your intelligence and dedication to improve it’s engineering to where all our companies can actually execute business goals better and faster. In a lot of cases, there are business people who have been hired to do the real business roles – managment, corporate negotiation, and market analysis.
That said there is one type of engineer who relates to this conversion – the CTO in a heavily technically aligned organization. I’m thinking of the great Eric Reis in an organization where the focus is on the technology to be so agile that the “problem finding” part of the organization can rapidly change directions based on results from engineering i.e. split testing and whatnot. That’s the kind of business-minded programmer I like to see – one who wants to engineerisize business instead of businessize engineering.
In the end, just
Put your code where you mouth is.
And you’ll be just fine
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It might be true that “most smart people, and especially engineers, are capable of making smart day to day business decisions when properly informed.” But it’s rarely true that they *are* “properly informed.”
In startups, it’s often the case that nobody is “properly informed” — sometimes there simply isn’t enough data to make a decision that is definitively good or bad. Having somebody who is business-savvy in these situations is handy, especially at a startup where non-business people will inevitably have to make business-focused decisions.
I know a lot of great engineers — very “smart people” — who are not very business-savvy, often because they (1) have a hard time relating to what a “normal” person needs or (2) are over-committed to great engineering and under-committed to great products.
To me, having engineers on my team who can get past these common blocks is a huge asset. I definitely value them all the more for it when making a hire. Of course, the “claim” of being business-savvy doesn’t prove anything. But if I can sense it, it’s definitely a good sign.
Hey Robby, thanks for commenting.
You have a good point – not all engineers are created equal.
Your comment makes me think who the great businessmen time of our era/generation are. Me, right now, when I think about emulating people in business I think about Jason Fried and DHH, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates.
I mean what does it mean to be a successful businessman? Build a successful business, right? And if you had to emulate a business, which business would and be and who is the primary person responsible for the success of that business?
But maybe not. Maybe when we say `Business` we mean the soft skills involved in running a business. Sales, negotiation, management, pricing, marketing, organizational direction, building company culture, etc.
What CEOs do you look up to? How many claim to primarily be business men or “coders who are capable of business”?.
I’ve read rework, four steps to epiphany, and other books and I consider myself not-dumb enough to be able to put them into practice, but I don’t call myself a business man.
Hey Scott,
Good questions.
Like you, I most certainly would not call myself a “business man.” But if somebody asked me to talk about something that interests me, or to name a recent article I’d read, or to talk about future ambitions, there is a better than 50/50 chance it would lean toward the business-side of things. Generally, I think I’m just more interested in the business side of things than a typical engineer is. Consequently I’m probably better read on issues like what to look for in a term sheet or how to critique an investor pitch. In a world where many companies are founded by first time entrepreneurs, I think that could come in handy. That’s why I love to see such interests in a any potential hire.
Another element to “business-savviness” among engineers is mastering the nontechnical skills of software development (sidenote: I’ve been drafting a blog post on this forever… you might have inspired me to finish it). A lot of engineers pride themselves on the technicals/academics of software development. I pride myself on other things. I’m good at not building solutions in search of problems. I care more about building an awesome product than having an awesome algorithm behind it. I take deliberate steps to avoid design-by-database-schema. None of these skills are particularly rare, but I do think there are a lot of otherwise-really solid engineers who too often fall into these traps. I won’t stereotype, but I will offer this anecdote: the two best technical engineers I ever worked with never managed to ship a single product in the two years I worked with them. By technical engineering standards they were phenomenal; by business standards they were a failure.
As far as CEOs I look up to, your list is a great one (I suppose DHH isn’t a CEO, but you get the idea). The other name I’d add is Chris Dixon. I love his bluntness and honesty on the blogging side of things, and I’m very impressed with Hunch’s execution on the experience side of things. I can also relate to him better than I can to most CEOs. I have similar ambitions, I usually find myself agreeing with his viewpoints, and I can imagine myself walking a similar path that he has. He made the transition from “coder who is capable of business” (as you put it) to “business man,” which is a transition I hope to make at some point. I feel similarly about Jason Fried. Though I am not as philosophically religious as he is, I agree with him more often than not, and I very much appreciate his tireless advocacy for sensibility in the business world.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are obviously the Gods of this arena. They have my undying respect, admiration, and lots of other nouns along those lines. But I don’t feel I learn as much from watching them as I do from following folks like Jason Fried and Chris Dixon. I feel so far removed from the way that they operate that I’m not sure how I could really channel my understanding of what they do and apply it to my own career. As many have observed, copying Apple’s strategy would be catastrophic for most startups.