Hacker|Engineer

Getting it right is easy. What you do when things go wrong shows real talent.

I was in lab last week with my two lab partners working on a Computer Hardware Design project. They’re two of the top students in my department, seniors, and they even hold down part-time consulting gigs during school. By virtually every measure available, these guys are amazingly good.

Yet they can’t debug. We hit a number of snags during our lab, and they just started freaking out. Was the oscilloscope bad? It must be, let’s run calibration. Try the circuit on another ‘scope. Different results. Curse some more at the equipment. Rip out half the circuit and replace it with a pulse generator (which caused its own family of problems). Blame the “bad” equipment some more. Eventually, we went home with no results.

These guys are used to getting it right the first time, and that cockiness hindered them when things went wrong. They’re fast, sure, when they already know how to do it and nothing goes wrong, but how often does that happen? Frankly, if I were a hiring manager, I would be hard pressed to hire either one. From what I’ve seen, things rarely go according to plan.

How you handle things when they don’t go according to plan is when real talent emerges. Maintaining a calm manner, having patience, and methodically isolating the problem are critical to being a good developer of anything, especially software.

I’ve often been puzzled by why some hot new technologies or services take off, and others that are similar (or even better) fizzle. Two that come to mind are Arduino and Dropbox. I’ve been working with PIC microcontrollers for years, and I get my chips for free via Microchip’s sample program. Why, then, would anybody pay $30 each? It’s the same functionality, just packaged differently. And there’s the key. Dropbox? I’ve had secure, remote storage for a long time. But now I have a dead-simple way of doing it, and guess what? I use Dropbox far more. Neither of these technologies are new, but both have taken their markets by storm nonetheless.

As a geek, I tend to miss what makes products appeal to others. For this situation, though, I think I’ve cracked it. Many purchasing decisions, especially for free things, are no longer about price. They’re about barriers. The easier it is for me to start using the tool or service, the more likely I am to buy it. Price factors in, but it’s secondary. Both Arduino and Dropbox are pathetically easy to start using, so why not? Even with all of my PIC expertise, I’d rather just pull out and Arduino and get started. With more and more things clamoring for our attention in this century, anything that reduces the time I have to spend on the task is a godsend.

The little things, then, are what differentiate the great products from the truly exceptional. Companies who figure out the key little things to make their product truly easy to get started with and use will often win in market others say is impossible to enter. Apple has demonstrated an amazing ability to hone in on these differences and exploit them to enter markets like MP3 players and cell phones and completely dominate within a few short years. Their products are often technically inferior, but they’re so much easier for the average user that customers continue to stand in line to buy iPhones even today.

If you’re a consumer-facing business, these little things could make or break your entire venture. With “free” web software, it’s even more critical since there’s no price to try and compete on. I certainly don’t yet have the ability to identify these differences before the fact, but anybody who does is a huge asset to whatever company he/she works for.