It’s no surprise that programmers hate business people. I hear it all the time — coders want to start their own companies and keep all those “biz dev” and marketing gurus out for as long as possible. More often than not, these “biz dev” experts are incompetent in whatever they’re trying to do, and engineers have no way of weeding out the good from the bad. In fact, it’s so easy to fake being good at biz dev that even my younger brother can do it.

Why so? Maybe because biz dev people don’t understand the technological difficulties of implementing a new feature. Or possibly because these “biz dev experts” get to pretend that they’re big shots when dealing with prospective business partners. But I don’t necessarily agree with this philosophy. I dislike most biz dev people not because of the fact that they’re business people, but because the vast majority of them are incompetent. It’s easier for a biz dev person to fake his abilities, so long as s/he knows the art of persuasion.

It’s easier to fake being good at business development

This is merely stating the obvious: It’s much easier to fake being good at biz dev than it is to fake being a good engineer. If you’re trying to rate a programmer, yet you have no programming experience whatsoever, you test to see if his (or her) code works or not. However, if you’re more technical oriented and you’re looking to find a good biz dev person, there’s no telling if the prospective “biz dev expert” is any good or not. In the coming few weeks, I’ll write some more about what to look for in prospective programmers and biz dev people.

Other way around: Programmers + Business = Fail ?

While the programmers complain about how biz dev people are useless and incompetent, I’ll suggest that it’s often the programmers who are inadequate at running companies. Not surprisingly, many of them are quite arrogant about their capabilities. Many of them think they know everything there needs to know about running a tech company (myself included) but they actually don’t. They don’t know how to hire the right biz dev people, yet they’re blaming their company’s problems on these bad hires. Pity.

Let’s take a break from all of this technology talk. Think about the world of small business — restaurants, small town shops, home contractors, auto repair shops, etc… The vast majority of them are started by “doers”, yet the vast majority of such companies fail. One might be an incredible cook, yet an incompetent manager. Another guy might be amazing at repairing cars, but he couldn’t attract customers if his life depended on it. Which brings me to my next point:

Business People are important!

I can understand why programmers hate biz dev people so much, as I’ve described above. I don’t think the issue is necessarily the fact that it’s easy to fake being good at biz dev. I don’t even think that the issue lies in the fact that programmers are incapable of finding good biz dev experts. Instead, the real biz dev and marketing gurus just don’t exist! They’re an incredibly rare breed — harder to find than even coders are! However, they’re crucial to the growing company. Most companies are founded by technicians who love cooking, repairing, or programming. Such technicians want to build amazing companies with as few incompetent business people possible, yet they don’t want to take an active role in managing business operations.

Another perspective that my friend AJ suggested to me: If you’re good at faking your biz dev abilities such that you’re able to get a job, you’ll probably be decent at doing actual biz dev! A lot of the work they have to do involves finding opportunities and schmoozing potential partners, clients, etc… Which means that strong persuasive abilities often equate to good biz dev abilities.

These so called technicians and engineers don’t want to schmooze with business partners and clients; they just enjoy baking their cookies and coding their web apps. I couldn’t blame them for feeling this way. However, it’s important that ANY engineer-turned-entrepreneur invest the much needed time in hiring only the most competent biz dev gurus — which means weeding out people like my baby brother who are merely good at faking their biz dev skills.

Afterthought: My younger brother, David Mah, is actually pretty smart. In fact, his engineering and marketing talents make me look dumb by comparison. And no, I will not let your start-up recruit him. He’ll be working with me one day :p