What I Expect From Engineers

Everyone doesn’t need to be an engineer.  But, if you are an engineer, you need some feel for the basics across all disciplines.  I saw a post where engineers weren’t expected to know what I would consider to be basic engineering.  Wrong, boy is that wrong.  That means, you better know not only your own field of engineering, but you need to know some amount of the basics in

Accounting.  You aren’t an accountant, but you need to know some basics.  What is income?  What is an expense?  What is an investment?  Understand the basics.

Sales and Marketing.  You better understand the basics of putting together concepts that will reasonate with the people you need to sell to.  This includes colleagues, management, and external customers.

Software.  No one is going to to expect you to write complex applications, but you had best understand the basic process of business rules, discovery, and putting that into code that solves problems.

Math.  Going along with software are databases.  Databases are complex math set theory.  You had best understand the basics.  We aren’t implementing multi-dimensional differential equations, but the basics of math, calculus, and set theory are actually important in life and business.

Mechaninical engineering.  Hopefully, you understand the basics of statics and dynamics.  If you don’t, well, I don’t want to be in a building you were involved in.

Electrical engineering.  Once again, I don’t need you to understand quantum effects of sub 5 nm vlsi design and how they effect design rules, but knowing what resistance, capacitance, and the basics of power are is a good thing.

Thermodynamics.  You aren’t designing an hvac system for a datacenter, but it would be great if you understood some basics.

Material science engineering.  You aren’t being asked to create new compounds or a new material design for a space craft.  I do expect you to know that the more you use a material, it will eventually wear out.

I also expect you to know your field of engineering.

We seem to live in a world we’re vibe coding is now somehow mistaken for software development and a professional service.  No, vibe coding is a quick solution to an immediate problem today, not a permanent solution to a serious problem.  I don’t want vibe coding doing product design, building in security for a user portal designed to process financial transactions, the electronic version of a a real estate mls listing form, the fuselage of a plane, the systems management of a 32 engine based rocket, or anything else that is serious.  

You need to bring some level of expertise to a job or project if you want to be taken seriously.

strategic

adjective

stra·​te·​gic strə-ˈtē-jik 

A product is considered to be strategic if it gets someone important excited.  That excitement can be either positive or negative.  For example, when I worked at The Coca-Cola Company, the former CIO hated lotus notes.  Whenever the subject of lotus notes came up, he would run around and tell the business unit that this was a strategic product and was 100% under his control.  Since he hated lotus notes due to one comment that a lotus salesperson made, he was going to kill any discussion of lotus notes.  Lotus notes was a strategic issue that only he was able to answer.  His name was Ira and he was moved to “special projects,” and Coca-Cola eventually had lotus notes.

Opportunity

opportunity noun

op·​por·​tu·​ni·​ty ˌä-pər-ˈtü-nə-tē  

-ˈtyü-

An opportunity is a big fucking problem coming your way.  

“This is an opportunity to show your value to the team.”

How to Pitch Me Bro

I’ve mentioned on my LinkedIn page that I do some small scale angel level investing.  I’m just a little guy.  Heck our group is just a bunch of little guys.  That’s ok because angel investing is for the first amount of investment into a company.  Angel investing is for providing enough money for an entrepreneur to spend some money on development after they’ve already had lots of conversations with customers.  Angel investments  aren’t for major investments.  Angel investments aren’t meant for millions of dollars.  Why anyone would want to take the time to pitch me, I don’t understand.

I get tons of messages every week over LinkedIn.  I got two today.  Trust me, I know what a pitch looks like even if you don’t call it a pitch.  What I don’t like, and others don’t like, are the LinkedIn message bombardment, and even going beyond that.  I’ve had multiple phone calls to me offices and to my cell phone.  I’ve gotten plenty of emails to all of my email addresses.  My father used to get emails with pitches meant for me.  I’m not alone in this. I’ve watched a phone call on a cell number at lunch wanting $10m in the first contact.  Don’t hassle people on the weekends, don’t call their personal cell phone numbers. Entrepreneurs think that this shows enthusiasm and initiative.  No, it doesn’t show anything good. To me, it shows desperation and the fact that you are uncoachable.  There are ways to act to get to a pitch, so don’t blow it before you have started.

I invest via an angel group called Community Equity Partners.  My max for any investment will be $5,000, so I’m insignificant.  What I do expect is you to go to their web site.  I expect you to fill out forms.  I expect you to call them.  They will perform the necessary due diligence on your startup.  That is why I pay them to be a member, to check you out.  They are designed for this process.  There are a few people there that will check you out, check out your social media, make some calls, check your credit report, check to see if you’ve been arrested (I’ve seen people that have been arrested do shady things with other people’s money), have you skipped town with the startup’s money (I’ve seen that), etc.

Here are my suggestions.

• Don’t go on LinkedIn and blindly message people that have the terms angel, investing, venture capital, or similar words in their bio asking for money.  That is not the right way to start a relationship.
• Don’t go call a phone number because someone gave it to you, or you found it via some data broker.  For some reason, this is popular amongst the Reddit crowd of entrepreneurs, or maybe it’s just the data brokers that sit in those groups.
• Do go to Google and search on “angel investors near me.”  Search on various versions of this term.  If you live in an area that is rural, expand your horizons because investors expect you to come to them, not the other way around.  Heck, I don’t expect you to come to our angel group, you can pitch remotely.
• If you are looking international for investment, good luck, but our group won’t invest.  You need to go find an investment group that will invest internationally.  There are plenty of good investments that are in the same country where I don’t have to worry with laws, regulations, a different legal system, etc.
• Do pick up the phone and call the offices of investment groups doing normal business hours.  Do email them.  Do whatever is necessary to get ahold of them. Ask questions like, how does your process work, how much money does your group typically invest, can I get started with your group.  These offices want to hear from entrepreneurs that want a two way street.  Your attitude will go a long way to help you in this.
• Be coachable.  Don’t just nod your head when you are told something.  I’ve been on the entrepreneurship side, so I know what needs to be done.  If I give you a contact, in a couple of weeks, I’m going to follow up with my contact to see if you contacted them.  I’m not a marketing expert, but I know the importance of talking to users, customers, and clients.  That takes money, time, effort, and energy that I expect you to do, and by you, I mean you as a founder.  Marketing is the biggest problem area I see for startups, and I’m talking about one on one founder directed marketing.  Be coachable about marketing.  One of the best lines I ever heard from a VC is “we’re looking for founders that can sell!”

So, do the above, and you’ll be in a good spot where our angel group will talk to you

PS.  Why do I say “Don’t pitch me bro!”  There is a time and a place for all things business related.  I went to an investor/pitch conference once.  I listened to the conference organizer talk about how to act.  He had a great line where he talked about the right and wrong times to talk to investors.  “When I’m standing at the urinal, don’t pitch me bro.”  There is a right and wrong time to contact someone and make a pitch, and when I’m standing at the urinal, that’s not the right time.  It’s a long story, but I made a similar mistake once (not pitching), so I remembered his line.

Algorithms Matter, mostly

I often hear about language wars where my language, such as c++ or another c derivative language, is better than your language, like Visual Basic.  There will be all kinds of basis for this, from letter counts to compile times to the man in the moon.  no, no, and no.  In my 30+ years of development, for the work that I do, languages do not matter.

First, let’s look at the kind of work that I do.  It is the same as 99% of developers.  There is some type of code that sits in front of some type of datastore.  This can be as simple as a web application sitting in front of a database. In general, there is some type of application that talks to some type of datastore.   There tends to be all kinds of plumbing between the application and the data store.  The application could be any type of application from a user interface standpoint.  It could be a web interface, a windows app, an iPhone app, or something else.  The datastore is most like a database with some type of intelligent processing happening, so it could be the database, a messaging system, some central processing, web services, or a host of other things.

You want to use your datastore as much as possible.  You don’t want to have a lot of communication between the database and the rest of the application.  Those are chatty apps, and can be really slow.  You also want to optimize your database, a good schema, a good indexing set based on the queries that the application runs are a good thing.

Now, a lot of algorithms don’t lend themselves to operating within a relational database.  A good Loic layer close to your database while only sending results to your front end application, now that is what is important.

Create optimal,algorithms, and your performance problems tend to solve the,selves.

Be Careful With The Marketing Bros

One of the things that I see that is counter productive is that startups are treated like “little companies.”  No startups aren’t little companies.  I see this a lot with economic development organizations.  

• Startups need to find customers.  No, customers aren’t just there in your web browser.  Startups need to go find customers early on and look at them face to face.  Startups need to knock on doors, introduce themselves, have conversations regarding pain points, talk to enough customers to get a broad understanding of of industry problems, figure out how to tailor solutions to meet those customer and industry problems.
• Too often, I see startups that are afraid to go talk to people face to face.  They make every excuse to not do the leg work.  I hear this argument against this “customers don’t know anything….blah blah blah, talking to customers is a waste of time, etc.”  customers have pocketbooks and money.  Ignore their needs at your own peril.
• Build a solution that is for one customer thinking it will work for everyone.  Writing code that is for a particular customer, just to get a sale is incredibly common, but leads you down the wrong path.  I did an inventory at one customer that had at least 100 reports, each report doing what one customer needed specifically in a search report.  That’s 100 pieces of code that must be supported, but you are only getting paid for it once.  Why not build a report that allows for customer customization so that each customer can build the query that they want?  I’ve done this and it isn’t very hard.  Instead of 100 reports that must be supported for the lifetime of a product/company, I built four screens that allowed a customer to tailor the search criteria involving 100+ criteria.  100 screens of custom code that has to be supported and can’t be shared or four screens of code that can be customized by the client to their heart’s content and when one improvement happens, everyone gets the update.
• Marketing is a great thing to do, once you have a product that is worth selling.  You’ll need to get into the Minimum Viable Product area and way of thinking.  I see these economic development organizations that push startups to do more marketing.  I get it, economic development organizations are marketing people.  That’s not the most important thing early on in a startup.  Economic development want to grow and think everyone else should to.  Until a startup has a defined product and a defined target market, marketing is like the ICBM that you launched but you didn’t tell it where to go.  You don’t have a recall button and you never get that second chance to make a first impression.  The marketing bros might be great once you have a defined product, a defined market segment to target, but early in, marketing bros of economic development whether independent marketing bros or the self proclaimed experts that do talks and have classes tend to do more harm than good.  You have limited resources.  Sure, take some shots early in, but don’t just blindly spend money, which is a problem I see.

This isn’t a condemnation of economic development organizations.  They can be good if you use them properly.  There are a lot of decisions that have to be made before you should spend the first dime on marketing.  As a startup, you don’t have infinite resources or money.  Stop, pause, and think thru what you should do first.  Engage with a few local customers that you know personally.  That will get you going better than anything else.  Once you’ve done that and proven that there is something there, then engage with economic development groups, angels, VCs, etc.

Does you startup need some help?  Do you have ideas, but don’t know how to get started?  I can put you on the right path, just contact me.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallymcclure/

Will AI actually kill software companies and developers?

 I'm hearing a lot about AI "killing" software companies. I just wanted to share some experiences and thoughts.

I worked at The Coca-Cola Company 30+ years ago. There was this idea that Coke should build its own software internally because it gave us total control over every feature we could ever want and that this was a competitive advantage. I would argue that for one off applications, this is true, but that for commodity applications where there is a large marketplace for multiple products, building on your own makes little sense. It is hard to understand the few that building your own database ODBC driver or MAPI driver for application automation provides a competitive advantage. For many years, many applications have provided the necessary integration today into the the necessary industry standards that have widespread support. We had a set of internal apps called KO/Office. Its key feature was email and discussion (threaded discussion). There was a DOS version and a Windows version. It worked ok. It didn’t work well in situations where there were disconnected offices, or rarely connected. This happened with offices in Africa as well as Asia at the time. We think of a standard internet connection as the default today, but it wasn’t back 30 years ago. While we could handle the issue with email, the discussion boards were not easily resolved, if they ever were. We spent millions trying to get “distributed bulletin board” to work and I don’t remember it working. To keep email working, we had rows of dos based computers that all they did was to login to various servers, look at email in a file based system, and then to transfer email. We had to have people that worked 24x7 to literally reboot these dos based mailmen. I tell the above story to say that I don’t believe in this idea that customers are going to build their own software for companies and stop using Saas based systems or third party software. While AI companies want to push this idea, they are really pushing themselves as the solution to a problem that really doesn't exist. I don't see where customers should staff up the necessary technical expertise to host their own applications, because when you take on your application it must be hosted somewhere and that is up to the company/customer. I’ve seen no evidence of customers building their own solutions to commodity problems. If they are doing it, i don’t know that and they aren’t prepared for the complexity and cost of what is going to happen. If a company is going to write their own software and not use Saas based systems, they need to think about the above story and all of the hidden costs. There tend to be a lot of hidden costs that they don’t see coming until the commitment is made. I also want to be clear that I believe that AI can help with tasks. I don't see it as taking over. Btw, from what I hear, Coca-Cola has a commodity smtp email system now, probably based on Microsoft Exchange Server, but I don't know that.