The John Scully's Disease

Is It Better To Teach Non-Engineers About Software, Or Engineers About A Business?

One of the most important things you learn after working in a startup is how most CEOs treat their big ideas like something precious, and behave very defensive about them, like chefs hiding their recipes from curious eyes.

That is simply absurd: anybody who actually creates things, as oppose to just writing about them, knows you do not get successful results on anything without a constant process of iteration and refinement.

In his 1995 “Lost Interview”, Steve Jobs described a kind of disease that had infected John Scully after Jobs left Apple. The disease of “thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work”.

Molding an idea into a product is a form of craftsmanship: balancing trade-offs, distilling the essentials of that idea and gelling them into formal language. Carrying those ideas to their ultimate consequences; bound them within the limits of our Universe.

Big ideas are just a seed; the originality is in the execution.

Knowledge Crunching

Can business experts build software? Sure they can. Excel has been the trailblazer for a long while, but nowadays there are thousands of no-code tools that allow non-engineers to develop software products from scratch, without any software engineer being present.

Is that effective, though? No. The lure of thinking that just because Amazon and Calendly weren’t founded by software engineers somehow implies that there wasn’t a deep technical aspect to it is another form of John Scully’s disease.

No-code, and the clueless business experts that use them, fail at scale. These tools almost incapacitate their users from acquiring feedback and incoporating it into the product. Experts are now responsible for creating a model of their work and its reality, but the tool forces them to do so without recourse to the expertise gained from earlier versions.

Software engineering are in the business of formalizing complex domains. They can build products in such a way that knowledge gained about how their users operate it accumulates over time. Engineers can embed explicit (concrete) and implicit (tacit) knowledge into a functioning “machine”.

Financial analysts crunch numbers. They look at tables and figures, and dive deep to find their underlying meaning and what’s ultimately important. Software engineers crunch knowledge. They take concepts, activities, rules, and organize the mass in such a way as to create a coherent, rigorous view, an expression of insight that serves the particular purpose of the business expert.

That can be taught, but not in 21 days. The most effective way to build software is by putting together an elite squad, both of engineers and business experts, crunching knowledge together and iterating aggressively. Those who still think that you can Uber-ize your company around a big idea, with a few junior engineers on deck, transposing that idea into software, are about to learn a very ugly truth.

That they’re infected. With the John Scully’s disease.