from Hacker News

Everyone at Your Startup Needs to Code

by gershwin on 8/7/15, 11:20 PM with 3 comments

• by vezzy-fnord on 8/7/15, 11:29 PM

  Well, no. "Code" does power all of the aforementioned, but only on a technicality. The code itself is ephemeral and possibly often domain-specific. The real importance is knowing the algorithms, data structures and the interface, protocols and standards of the platform you are targeting, or the details of the problem you are solving. Coding itself is grunt work. One must have a specification of what they want to do for it to be of any use.

  As such, everyone coding has no meaning.

  Further, if everyone coding means that they too can cargo cult slogans about how the goto statement is the devil incarnate and will have you assaulted by a raptor, then perhaps one should rethink whether it's worthwhile. Now, if one can get people to consider that a goto might be useful for breaking out of a nested loop in some languages, or that goto/jmp is the most primal control flow from which other mechanisms are derived, then you have a case. Otherwise, more ninja rockstar 10xers aren't of large use.

• by cpncrunch on 8/7/15, 11:43 PM

  Or you could hire engineers who actually get the job done in a reasonable timeframe without someone else having to poke about in the code and potentially screw things up.

• by svisser on 8/8/15, 12:21 AM

  If everyone needs to learn to code then we, as software developers, have failed at what we do.