Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new skill insult French speakers everywhere?
I keep encountering this attitude among programmers, that the idea of "learning" is something that is the completion of a journey of worthiness. It's extremely disappointing.
I don't know... but I've had coworkers who are not professional programmers, but who wind up "helping out" with programming on the job, and I desperately wished that instead, they didn't know a thing.
Instead of them respecting my job more, they come to respect it less because they think they can do it just as well as I can. They think they're perfectly capable of forming time estimates because they insist "they" could do x task quickly, despite the fact that they're clueless about architecture, refactoring, documentation, testing, etc. They have no conception of why spaghetti code is bad, or what it even is.
Of course, this is all probably due more to management problems than anything else, but it is a very good example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
And as for the French analogy: I've known people who claim to speak French and then get themselves into hairy situations due to misunderstandings because they greatly over-estimate their skills and are overconfident in what they "think" they understood. It's equally infuriating.
Exactly. I don't know why I've been hearing this so much lately. I've been researching about learning to use 3D software (3dsmax) and I get the same responses that I hear about learning to code: "oh it is very difficult and it will takes at least 5-10 years to be able to build anything of quality" Personally, I think if it takes you 10 years to become decent at anything, then you are doing it wrong.
I don't know. I think some things can legitimately take some people ten years to learn, even if they are doing it right. However, my disagreement is that sometimes learning something at a cursory level, even if it doesn't allow you to do quality work, can be worthwhile. It can give you insight and appreciation of the discipline and help you work more effectively with the people that really do it. It can also be fun and make people feel proud to just be able to do it a little.
Just a quick datapoint. I've used 3dsmax casually (free, academic version), and I managed to produce some images of which I was quite proud. They weren't magnificently detailed scenes, but they were photorealistic representations of the objects I was modeling. So no, it definitely doesn't take 10 years to get to the point where you can make something meaningful in 3dsmax.
It does, however, take grit, because there's a ton of documentation to read, particularly concerning rendering settings.
Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments?
I think the implication is that it's obnoxious when people equate "learning a little French grammar and vocabulary" with "learning to speak French". Similarly, many of these pop-tech articles don't appear able to differentiate between "learning a little JavaScript grammar and vocabulary" and "learning to program". (I'd bet that the principals at the companies mentioned do know the difference, but they have an obvious incentive not to emphasize it to the press or to their potential customers.)
I've got a better idea. You give me the $4k and I'll fly to San Diego and beat you with a stick any time you stop working.
Seriously though, this is a really weird plan. It's a huge amount of money to spend for something that almost certainly won't have the effect you want. Unless you want burnout and a serious case of "maybe we should have budgeted more time to take a look around Hong Kong, which is actually pretty cool".
Take a working vacation if you want, but it's not the place you're in that's causing you trouble.
Oh snap. Seriously Jonathan, what you have here is a mixture of impatience and imperfect self-discipline, probably because you and your partner have not yet hit on an idea that truly excites you, to the point where social or practical considerations are simply less interesting.
I agree. The problem might not be your work environment, but what you are working on. When you say "we always seem to be distracted by all stuff going around us in our lives" I think that your project isn't interesting enough to over shadow everything going on around you. Do you even feel excited about your projects?
I understand where people are coming from. I've made a few small startups- that all ended up unsuccessful. I'm at the point where my standards for ideas are much higher now, so when I actually do have an idea- I'm often so excited by it that I can't sleep for weeks thinking about how I would implement it.
The stuff that "distracts" us are responsibilities. They range from working part-time as a sysadmin to pay bills from taking care of family members who are in current need of my support, and having to deal supporting a friend who had to deal with an attempted suicide. I already sleep 6 hours, and spend the rest of my days working.
I figured that one hour less of sleep, and relocating myself temporarily will allow me to simply shift the remaining time that I don;t have for the startup for the startup. It's precisely because I'm excited to work more on my startup that I want to move things around.
I'm not sure why I'm being classified as impatient or lacking in self-discipline. I'm 23, but I've been working to support myself since 18. I don't rely on other people, especially my parents who work hard enough as it is, for money. I don't drink, smoke, or play games, and I've worked my way up as a sysadmin- enough to have savings to be unemployed for the next few years. As replied to the other posts, it's not so much the lack of excitement the startup brings me- it's precisely because it's so interesting that I want to take time off from the remaining things I do to support that cause.
It's a weird plan and a lot of money- but it means getting things done the way I see it. We've worked successfully in Cupertino before for 2 weeks with a similar schedule- the only reason we can't explore that option now is because there's certain family drama and social responsibilities I have to acknowledge if I go back there.
We've traveled to many parts of the world and I've lived in Hong Kong before. Each time I do take a vacation there- it's really not the most ideal place for me.
I'm not looking for a vacation, and I'm not stressed or too impatient for success- I'm just looking for a change of pace.
If we had to, we could stay for 4 weeks, work 3 and take more time to look around Hong Kong then for the last week.
It's impossible to answer this properly without seeing your site. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts:
1. Features don't matter in the abstract. You can succeed with fewer features by being, for example, simpler. That's the 37signals "do less" line. You say features are crucial for your white-label solution. Are you so sure? Why do you think this is? How do you know this is why you are losing customers? ("Clearly" is a dangerous word). Who do you think your customers are? What if your customers were somebody else? (See point 3).
2. "...even though their price point is higher..." - this suggests you don't know that high price is often precisely why customers choose things. High prices suggest high quality, and in the absence of other ways of distinguishing between products, it's a very easy one for people to follow. Perhaps you charge so little that you give the impression of not being serious? And, relatedly, perhaps if you charged more you would be able to spend more to acquire users?
3. Pick a niche and own it. If your site works for user types X, Y and Z, just pick some subset of X to go after. Your product will be more targeted to them, which makes it easier for them to see it as something they could use, and it also should make it easier for you to market. See, for example, the many sites that offer build-your-own-websites for photographers, as opposed to simply just build-your-own-websites for everybody.
4. Win on design, on copywriting, on user experience, on humour, on speed, on sociality, on security, on reliability, on locality, on trust, on friendliness. Win on anything that's not what you can't win on. On the internet, there's room for more than one winner.
But, like I said, if we could see your site you'll get better answers.
Too many people these days think they are entitled to everything for free, especially on the internet. I dabble in angel investing and you wouldn't believe how many people think they are entitled an investment because they think they have "the next big thing" -- if they are so sure, bootstrap it and prove it!
I apologize, I probably should have been more clear about this point.
I do not at all believe that I am in any way entitled to things for free. I myself am in computer science and contributed to OSS and get annoyed by people frequently thinking that software/services have no value just because they are getting used to having things for free.
That being said, I did consider that there are many (more or less successful) business models centered around services that are (partially) free for end-users (e.g. social networks, email, ...). I have not yet founded any startup myself, so I don't want to lean myself out of the window and claim that something like that would be successful for business this.
We (the group of people wanting to conduct the polls) are students. It's not like there wouldn't be a budget for something like this; but a lot of the good services have high per-poll or monthly rates.
So my question was not why someone isn't doing a lot of work to provide me with a quality service, but more: Why isn't there anything between [free + basically broken] and [amazing + highly priced].
Why is there nothing in between? Is there no market for a middle segment? This I believe to be a valid question.
That is a much better question. Although I can't tell you why in this specific scenario, I can tell you that middle markets can be tough because they're not the cheapest or the most expensive, which are two common selling points.
Say you have doubts, and that you want to discuss them. Then discuss them, in an orderly and dispassionate way. Keep in mind the possibility that you are the one who's wrong, and you'll be fine. Be calm, rational and modest.
Also: creativity does not mean not rejecting ideas. Creativity involves rejecting vast quantities of ideas. It just also involves creating more ideas than you reject. So one important phase of being creative is uncritically spawning vast numbers of ideas. Another important phase is critically evaluating them. Hemingway (apparently - this is potentially apocryphal) said "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to throw the shit in the wastebasket."
1. Work out what material you need to cover on your required studies.
2. Break it down into shorter, manageable bits. A chapter per week, perhaps.
3. Make completion of these bits concrete, so you know you are progressing (and not just reading). Completing the exercises, perhaps.
4. Break down the bits even further, so you can plan them across days.
5. Every day at the same time, start working on these bits.
6. When you finish your bits for a day, stop working. Your reward is the rest of the day to learn about whatever you feel like, guilt-free.