Non-Technical Founders: Stop Learning How To Code

[AgonI]

Trying to become wealthy by the internet/apps and not knowing a damn thing about code or technology is laughable.

Likewise, let me suggest that you don't know a damn thing about mathematics or finance when you try to manage your millionaire empire. :smilielol:

The king has spoken. // End discussion here

 

[JasonR]

look at Dart and save time,headache.

dartlang.org

Hah wow this is an old post. I'm so glad I never learned to code.

 

[Emanuel]

Hah wow this is an old post. I'm so glad I never learned to code.

I'm so glad I learned to code.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Ing]

Here, here! @MJ DeMarco. I know this post is primarily focused on learning to code and it is exactly it where I sit every evening slogging away with HTML & CSS after my 9-5 job. I will get to it

My concern for any potential new entrepreneurs (young and old) was somewhat triggered by some of the potentially damaging comments listed above, that could impact your life or business.
For example outsourcing all accountancy because you don't want to learn the math. What utter bullshit!

(FYI My background is Mechanical Engineering, 10 years experience Design & Product Management of high tech systems/products for use is chemical processing facilities where standards exceed that of semi-conductor industry)

This is just my 5 cents for those of you who want to skip the process and hire people to do everything for you without even at least learning the fundamentals of every part of your business. Of course there are always success stories out there (good on you) but there are also horror stories.

Whether its an online marketing company, manufacturing sex toys or selling kitty litter, YOU and you alone are gambling with your life and business.

So what happens dear people:

• If your accountant F*cks up your books, who is accountable at the tax office?
• If someone hacks your site due to bad programming and/or security protocols & steals all the private information from your customers, who is accountable?
• If someone has already pissed in your kitty litter and you distribute it, who is accountable?
• If you sell a sex toy without the required safety reviews and accreditation (CE marking, FDA TUV etc.) and it kills someone, who is accountable? (not sure if that is a good or bad way to go)
• etc.

Who?? Not the people who did the work for you or with whom you contracted the work too! YOU or your business is accountable! Please go ahead and enjoy:

• the fines,
• the excessive rework costs (excluding all the times you have been ripped off up until that point)
• the eventual folding of your business as you kiss your reputation goodbye;
• Oh and of course very worst case, if your found personally liable, there is always the good old fashioned, "Go to F*cking jail, don't pass F*cking go, and don't collect your F*cking €2.5 billion" (due to negligence, tax evasion, manslaughter etc.)

If you have not got a fundamental grasp on what is needed in every aspect of your business you are at risk.

So as a start up, I will continue to build coding practice into my extensive learning program. Why? Because I will own my shit! Because I am not scared of a challenge the size of a mountain! Because when the time comes to pull the trigger, my competitors (already with billions in their banks) will have a hard time keeping up rather than simply copying and taking the idea from me.

I am in no way saying that I aim to be or will be a coding expert in the end, and I fully expect by next year (or most likely by Christmas), that the detailed level of coding knowledge that I have practiced will be gone and lost forever.

What is Most Critical and Most Importantly though, the principles of coding will never be forgotten, the big picture view (roll-on Steve Jobs) can always be applied to hiring, firing, concept generation and understanding and challenging other peoples work.

We are (or at least I am) not here to get rich quick (& dirty), we are here to:

1. Get rich fast, with the best odds for success, profitability, growth, security & sustainability.
2. Which stems from applying integrity, efficiency (in all phases & fields) & flexibility to a value-giving-product in a dynamic market,
3. Which in turn stems from "knowing one's shit"!
4. Which in turn stems from investing yourself now (aka: doing the F*cking work) (aka: Process)

Of course, pick your battles. I will learn the financial aspects when my product is ready to make money, I will learn the legal aspects when the product is tested and ready for manufacture/release, and I will learn marketing when I have my product on the market. (actually that is how I fill my breaks )

For now, because the platform of by business is web/app based, the focus is on learning that. Thus minimizing MY Risk, financial input and time to launch. I will be investing purely from my work income and therefore when I eventually hire someone to develop the website&app it will be done effectively and precisely based on the detailed and clear specification I give to a programmer.

If you don't want to do your mathematics, your coding, your market research, your product analytics etc.
That is fine it is your choice.
I cannot see a lower risk path for how to give value and sustain that value for as many people on this planet as possible, only to have it take away/removed or to loose my grip on the market share.

Additionally if it all goes tits up, the process is established and the next product will be on the market in a fraction of the time.

Some light reading to underpin the risks for non-technical start-ups, or for non-technical leadership:

How to Build Good Software

www.csc.gov.sg

Rant over.

I give you a YES! I call that the wish for perfection.
But: often in my life that wish for perfection prevented my to get in action.

In the 1980s I learned sth like BASiC than while studying Pascal.
As I never found someone that could serve my interest for the steps from 1/0 to Pascal or so, I lost the interest in coding. I had no need for it though, also I had my best grades there.

Its the same as with domestic heating: allways quits on Christmas! Thats why I can serve my heating units.

 

[Ing]

Well,

And it continues STILL, 7 YEARS LATER.

Imagine if the people debating this topic had gotten to work instead of debating about one or the other, and instead just chose a path and stuck with it?

do you think, that are the same people?
Or do you thonk, nowadays problems of people are really different?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[InMotion]

I stopped a long time ago. The experience factor required in this arena is way beyond worth learning for anything but small stuff, IMO. Great article.

 

[theDarkness]

Could Jobs code?

Sometimes I wonder whether the "looking for a tech co-founder" stuff is a cover for not having a need that the presumed founder is ready to fill. They want someone who's been out programming as a job for years who can tell them what the sticking points are in the industry. Or maybe not. I don't really know. Is it that they simply don't want to pay to hire someone? I think it could very easily become that mythical unicorn that you chase that "prevents" you from ever really knuckling down.

Eventually you'll have to assemble a team to grow past a certain point and detach the rewards from your time, so at some point you have to let go of your own coding skills. I think it's no different than any industry - you have to know a LOT about the industry in general so that you can steer the ship, but knowing how to do every little thing yourself is only really relevant when bootstrapping . . .

 

[dknise]

Trying to become wealthy by the internet/apps and not knowing a damn thing about code or technology is laughable.

Likewise, let me suggest that you don't know a damn thing about mathematics or finance when you try to manage your millionaire empire. :smilielol:

Of course the argument to that would be that you don't need to know anything about mathematics or finance, you'll just hire someone who does. I'm just going to go through life not knowing anything and am going to be super successful! :smilielol:

 

[Skys]

How do you hire people in this field if you don't know anything about it?


How do you have a technical co-founder if you can't judge what a good or bad technical co-founder is?

Most recruiters/headhunters do a pretty good job at Silicon Valley doing just that. You don't need to learn how to program to 'detect' a good programmer.

"How do you spot a good coder when you don't know anything about it?"

Okay, now give me the quote where he says, literally, that you should learn to program. There are lots of ways you can learn about the tech world, without being a programmer.

But if you want to spend your next 10 years into becoming a ninja programmer, all the luck to you.
I am pretty sure a lot of things that you need to become a succesful entrepreneur are not being teached in your house learning how to code

Learn programming in 21 days

 

[Skys]

I think of it like - if you want to make a biz selling pies, you better know a whole hell of a lot about the process of creating and selling pies.

This is how I think about it too. If you are in the pie business, you better know a lot about pies.
On the other hand. This might be completely untrue.
Tony Heish, from Zappos, knew nothing about shoes, or ecommerce. He just made it work, with a great team.

I start to believe, maybe completely wrong, that entrepreneurship is way more of a teamsport than most books make it to be.
So, maybe you know a ton about marketing the pie, selling the pie and getting tons of customers,
while your buddy knows everything about baking them.
Focus on your strengths.

I have my doubts about people starting to learn how to program because they read an inspirational book like the Fastlane Millionaire. Why? Because most programmers just get really good at it by, dare I say it, loving programming a whole lot. They spend hours and hours honing their craft. Many of them have done this for over 10 years.
Now, somebody reads a book about entrepreneurship and reads the inspiring story about PayPal. Programming does seem like a logical stap.. but is this somebody doing it for the love of programming? Or for the love of entrepreneurship? or just, dare I say it, because he thinks he will make a ton of money by becoming a very good programmer?

Although I disagreed with a previous writer who said that above 25 it's a waste of time. I disagree when this person really wants to learn it, because of programming. I agree, if it's because he read in a book that you can become really rich with learning how to program.

Since this is the fastlane forum.. a guide to millions, a lot of people come to this site with the dream / goal to become really rich. I might come to the wrong conclusion by saying that most will learn programming for the wrong reasons (= making (lots) of money and therefore will fail, but I do believe it's true.

 

[Twiki]

I still believe that if anyone is dithering, hemming and hawing about whether or not they "should" learn programming, they have no business developing a product or service that is dependent on programming. Of course, non-technical people can still do well with businesses that depend on technology to some degree, but I bet that is because they are resourceful in different ways and I imagine are not wasting a second anguishing about whether or not they need to learn programming in the first place.

The people who need to be convinced to figure this stuff out, whether it's basic scritping or hosting or database concepts, are not going to be any good at figuring this stuff out. Paul Graham said the number one quality he looks for in a company founder is resourcefulness. From that, we can infer that lack of resourcefulness is the number one quality of the people who never had a chance in the first place.

I think "Can someone tell me whether or not I should learn programming before I build my internet business?" and "Can someone tell me what internet business I should start?" are indicators of the same characteristic.

 

[Nur]

Funny and I was just contemplating learning PHP today...

look at Dart and save time,headache.

dartlang.org

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[theag]

Hah wow this is an old post. I'm so glad I never learned to code.

So glad I can do basic coding myself.

 

[theag]

The good thing with the proliferation of the internet is that there are so many online resources, a lot of the "code" that you need you don't even need to write.

Copy & Paste is a coders best friend

This. Exactly how I built most of my site's functionality . Besides having the functionality that I need now I learned a lot and am much more competent in speaking with real programmers now to take my business to the next level.

 

[stevethe bungee]

I wrote a ridiculously bad post on this thread about a year ago. It's back a few pages. Here's one of the things that I said



A lot of time has passed since I wrote that comment and it's still true. I actually took the time to learn the ins and outs of code..and here's the verdict:

...It's worth the time.

12 months ago I was literally handicapped with what I could personally do to my site. I always had to pay someone to do the work for me, and overtime, paying people gets expensive and sometimes just as time consuming.

Learning the ins and outs of code has made a huge difference in my life. For example, for the longest time I wanted to put a statistics feature onto the profiles of my users. To do this I would need to give the users the ability to dynamically update their stats on the profile, save the data in a database, then call the data back onto the front-end. 12 months ago, I would have thought that this is an overly complicated task. I would have spent 1 week creating a mockup and then I would have probably overpaid for the work. I created the feature in about 1 night, then I realized that I could enhance the visualization of the data with some jQuery..+1 more more night. It turns out that the task was actually very simple to complete.

View attachment 8363

How I learned:
Most people seem to go straight to the education and tutorials. That's great and all. Udemy always provides a lot of great courses. I learned the basics by diving into the code myself and playing with the code until I figured it out. I rebuilt webpages about 100x over, restructured databases, rewrote php code, and made huge mistakes along the way. My advice is to have someone build a site for you and then learn on your own site with the help of some tutorials in your spare time.

And of course, I still believe that the key to everything is sales and traffic. But I'm not going to lie..one year later knowing way more about how to code has made a huge difference.

Also, consider your goals. I had no intention of ever learning. Sitting at a computer for hours is the last thing that I want to do. I learned out of necessity. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. It's easy to say "don't learn", but put yourself in a position where you need to do whatever you can to survive and you'll see that you're opinions about everything will change.

That makes sense to me

 

[greenlotus]

It can be daunting if you don't know zilch and you're operating on a shoe string budget. You could get screwed if you're the brain child of the start-up. Trust me, I've had this experience. Left out in the middle of a project by my tech partners. Had to source for money to get it completed by outsourcing. Now, what I do is outsource and have my tech team on timelines. IMO learn a little about the code you want to use in the tech start-up.

 

[Ninjakid]

I think it really depends on the person. Some people can learn something and become great at it. And some people just don't like relying on others. Some people just aren't interested in learning programming and that's cool.

But saying that it's ridiculous to learn how to code because someone else can do it for you is like saying it's ridiculous to learn a second language because you can always get someone to translate or you.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[BlueMoon]

I think it depends on the industry you're in (or want to be in) but generally speaking; for most industries it will be vital to at the very least understand coding. Kids are learning this is school right now, it will be their 2nd language. And even if you had nothing to do with coding in your business, it might still be useful to at the very least be able to communicate, even if on a basic level, with coders you hired. Whether you want to specialize in it is a whole other story.

 

[The Abundant Man]

I don't think it would hurt to learn to code. Should it? It can only help

 

[oku]

I could be wrong but I picked up a lot of valuable resources along my journey.

ATST (At the same time), I'm technically inclined, and dreamed of being a techpreneur throughout HS and majored Software Dev in Uni.

I taught HTML5 & CSS3 In a west African code camp, where I found small business owners (mostly baby boomers) looking to cut corners by building sites themselves.
I found it wouldn't be worth the time to help them up and around the learning curve.

(Like if You Can Code)

 

[amp0193]

Rant over

Great post! I agree that it’s very difficult to hire for something you don’t know anything about.

One alternative to learning to code yourself would be to partner with a technical cofounder. But then, how do you vet a technical cofounder when you don’t know anything about coding?


I’m having this dilemma now with product engineering. I know next to nothing about engineering but I’m having to work with engineers and contract it out. I’ve been riding the struggle bus lately. Trying to learn as much as I can about the process so that I can make a good hire when the time comes to bring someone in full time.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Brewmacker]

Great post! I agree that it’s very difficult to hire for something you don’t know anything about.

One alternative to learning to code yourself would be to partner with a technical cofounder. But then, hoe do vet a technical cofounder when you don’t know anything about coding?


I’m having this dilemma now with product engineering. I know next to nothing about engineering but I’m having to work with engineers and contract it out. I’ve been riding the struggle bus lately. Trying to learn as much as I can about the process so that I can make a good hire when the time comes to bring someone in full time.

Product Engineering is my day to day business amp. If you have any questions just PM me and ill do my best to help you out.

 

[srodrigo]

Don't learn how to code. Then, trash your million dollars ideas because you go ask for a prototype and you get a 10-100k quote, which you are not willing to/can't pay.

Also, don't know the basics, and become one of those unicorn entrepreneurs that want to make Facebook in 2 months with a graduate and his nephew.

 

[DeletedUser0287]

I am so glad I learned to outsource.

What do you suggest for those that don't have the cash to outsource?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[TonyStark]

The debate continues... haha

And it continues STILL, 7 YEARS LATER.

Imagine if the people debating this topic had gotten to work instead of debating about one or the other, and instead just chose a path and stuck with it?

 

[srodrigo]

Coding is no longer requires, neither are copy writers, or "tech guys". Everything has been so simplified. You no longer need to hire someone to provide leads for you. All of the issues we once had have been solved.

Could you elaborate a bit more?