I don't want to be some sort of Kevin Rose defender in this thread, but I don't think it's fair to say that he just "had an idea". He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time. I think he deserves credit for that.
As a developer, I agree that some "ideas guys" suck. But some of them are fantastic, and have a huge talent in taking a core concept and fleshing out requirements, objectives and so on. Often we developers are actually really bad at that, and we end up getting distracted by endless refactoring, or bringing down response times, etc. etc.
He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time
Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.
Its not like he toiled in his basement for years slaving over it. (Though he did seem to spend a lot of time on it once it became his day job, I don't want to discredit that)
You can also say that the Digg 4.0 was his "idea" and its what effectively buried Digg and started the mass exodus to Reddit (which is now very true to the original digg).
Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.
Right, so he made it a success.
I just find it disheartening sometimes that developers (and I am one) seem to think that good code is all that matters. It isn't. You can have the most functional, highly-tuned web site in the world and have no-one use it.
Even if Kevin Rose is nothing but a giant hype machine then he deserves credit for being a giant hype machine. Digg would have failed if he wasn't.
developers are a dime a dozen. I can hire ten people from India or China who are better than you (xpose2000).
most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.
Most people from any profession would dislike anybody who thinks they are "dime a dozen" or "replaceable by ten people from India or China". Won't you? But disliking someone (like you) because they don't appreciate the profession is different from hating successful people.
As a developer who also has an MBA (and who's originally from India), I never understand why most MBA students at my school undermined developers so much ("Just hire ten people from India"). On the other hand, I also don't understand why many developers undermine domain experts and businessmen as "MBA types" or "ideas people".
It should be very easy to understand (for anybody who is smart enough to be a developer or to get an MBA) that the level of expertise you need from a software developer or a sales person or a finance person or a product person depends on your specific case. Not every business can be built by outsourcing all development to India. And not every business can be built (or be successful) without the help of a great domain expert / sales person / product person.
Looks like your post is getting a mixed reaction. I think you're both right and wrong.
You can outsource to a lot of cheap, technically talented developers (you can also very easily end up with awful developers, though). But they won't think on their feet or be able to make independent decisions- they are contractors, and they will make exactly what you tell them to.
If you're technically minded yourself that might be fine- you can give very specific, down to the pixel instructions. But if you're an "ideas guy" you're not going to have any answer when feature X is not technically possible, and the contractors aren't going to help you.
execution is not limited to personal skills. if the "ideas guy" doesn't have the skills to implement his ideas, he can hire/partner with someone who can.
Right on. I went to a hackathon as a facilitator/judge type. There were 3 idea guys for every dev. The devs centered on some good ideas or brought their own. There were several idea guys that left feeling like their billion dollar idea was just missing a code monkey cog to slide into the code monkey cog slot to make it happen.
One of them had come up with oink aka foursquare aka yelp aka gowolla ...
Not sure I see your point - one of those thousands of developers out there can partner with or hire one of those thousands of him out there as well. There are lots of people who can program and lots of people who have ideas, and not so many people who can work together to technically execute ideas into profitable technology. Which is kind of the point the people you have been arguing with have been trying to make.
> Ideas yes. GREAT ideas? rare. Great ideas + execution? rarer.
Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.
Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.
There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.
speaking as an American engineer who has had to deal with a lot of code produced by "cheap" Indian and Chinese programmers, I can't help but laugh at the naivete of this perspective. You tend to get what you pay for in a global market where the price is efficient.
Also in my experience ideas and idea people are a dime a dozen. I have notebooks full of hundred ideas I don't have the time, energy or money to execute on. Talent (and availability and interest, etc) is hard to find. That's the bottleneck.
> You tend to get what you pay for in a global market where the price is efficient.
I agree that the proposition is naive. That said, the global market for programmers' salaries (or contractor's rates) is most definitely not efficient.
Developers are unimportant. I'd rather hire bad developers than good ones as long as they're cheap; product quality rarely matters if you have the right market fit.
Sounds like unnecessary nickle-and-diming. In my experience, good devs don't cost astronomically more than their mediocre counterparts.
While it's true that you don't need to re-implement MongoDB in Clojure to create a successful product, it's not like product quality doesn't matter. Unreliable performance could certainly cost you clients - especially in the enterprise world. Why risk it just to save a few $k?
Twitter went down all the time and yet stomped all over its competitors, all of whom had far better uptime. Digg was outsourced for rock bottom prices. Facebook and WordPress are mountains of PHP code.
The reason those educational software products aren't selling has nothing to do with the fact that they were offshored and everything to do with poor market fit or marketing, I guarantee you.
He didn't start promoting it on air at techtv, he started promoting it on TWiT, Leo Laporte's podcast that was started after the screen savers was more-or-less cancelled.
>He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time. I think he deserves credit for that.
I don't think anyone has argued against this. He does deserve credit for this.
The problem is that he has been given too much credit. I.E. that there were far more ideas of the same caliber. I am sure this must have been tough on him, to fail at producing again like the early digg iteration.
I see the evolution of the social content site to be:
Slashdot --> Digg --> Reddit.
Each a stepping stone for the next. And I do not think this is about THE CONTENT -- I think this is about the UX you provide the users, and the control over that UX you leave to the users.
Digg evolved /.'s model. Reddit evolved Digg's.
Reddit has provided a UX which allows for a VERY fluid and quick experience with the content, given FULL control to the users on what content they see, how it is categorized, modded etc.
Kevin took money from ivestors for his own little think tank - that money was largely given to him by charismatic reputation alone.
Now, after a very short period, he isn't even pivoting, or "shooting this idea in the head to work on others" -- he is abandoning the whole freaking endeavor and taking (unknown) position in struggling social company, Google.
This doesn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth (Sour Milk? (Sorry)) because being given $1.7MM which he gets to walk away from is a slap in the face to the people who work their asses off on good ideas and don't get any of the valley coddling as Kevin.
This is the wrong storyline. Reddit didn't evolve from Digg.
They started around the same timeframe and it was as much Mac/PC in terms of fanboyishness. Reddit won because of the power of subreddits and capturing the long tail for content and communities.
What's out of touch with your story is that Digg users thought Reddit's UX was horrifying and avoided it like the plague. Even to this day without enhancement suites I wouldn't crown Reddit to be the pinnacle of UX. It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac.
Finally, this jaded bitterness that Kevin Rose got $1.7MM to piss away...
If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.
I was not trying to imply reddit evolved FROM digg. (I have been using all three sites since their inception - starting with /. in 1997, I am familiar with their history).
I am saying the IDEA of social content sites evolved from one, to the next, to the next.
As I mentioned, it is not about UI, or content, it was about UX!
The UX that digg had, especially in V4 wrapped too much UI around the content resulting in a poor UX!
Reddit, while seemingly ugly - allowed for far faster and more fluid consumption of the content. It also left more control over what content users wanted.
>It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac
I think you're putting too much weight on the shiny.
I think anyone would agree that the speed and agility one gets on a CLI (linux) vs any GUI when you're a savvy user is incomparable.
Finally, I am not jaded/bitter because Kevin Rose got 1.7MM -- I am jaded bitter that anyone would get 1.7MM and so nonchalantly walk away from it AFTER making the types of comments he did.
I think I just have a different perspective than you, I also think you believe I am focusing on things which I am not. :)
> If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.
So you are implying that a luck and contacts and more other things such as your experience, geolocation, etc. don't matter as long as you are worth getting $X, you will have $X to piss away.
uhm, is there any website to sign up? I want to try my skills against it -- perhaps I am "worth it".
And that everybody earns every penny that they really should. Nobody's ever born the wrong color or gender or nationality, or ever has bad luck that prevents them from fulfilling their potential.
But he got to plug it on ScreenSavers because he worked his way up from being the IT guy on the show to cameo appearances onscreen to actually having his own show. Major props on the hustle there.
He also wrote some of the code for the first iterations of Digg himself, so its not like he didn't do any coding originally. He just passed in on to more skilled people once the requirements were out of his league.
As a developer, I agree that some "ideas guys" suck. But some of them are fantastic, and have a huge talent in taking a core concept and fleshing out requirements, objectives and so on. Often we developers are actually really bad at that, and we end up getting distracted by endless refactoring, or bringing down response times, etc. etc.
There is nothing wrong with a mix of the two.