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.

* if the "ideas guy" doesn't have the skills to implement his ideas, he can hire/partner with someone who can.*

Right. A developer.

Right. He can partner with or hire one of the thousands of developers available out there.

They're all inundated with offers from the millions of "idea guys" out there. Idea guys a dime a kilo.

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 ...

Sad really.

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.

But there are far more people with ideas than people who can program. Programmers aren't in any way the commodities in this scenario.

Maybe you've never heard the famous expression "Ideas are like *, everybody's got one".

> 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.

Ideas yes.

GREAT ideas? rare.

Great ideas + execution? rarer.

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.

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?

> Name a successful product made by bad developers.

Wordpress and nearly every PHP app you can find.

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.