Why Tech Guys Are Less Entrepreneurial

I have figured out why tech guys rarely start their own business. Or should I say: why I'm not doing great, sales-wise.

We love to have clear requirements and be sure that we can meet those requirements.

image: portalcfo.com

I can't count the number of times I've seen a tech guy fume and scream at a sales guy that he should verify first with him before replying to a client's technical request. And of all those times the technical guy still figured out a way to get it done while coming up with several contemptible names for the sales guy. 

The non-tech guys take a project first before figuring out how to do it, and most of the times, they simply look for a tech guy to do it. While a tech guy, first, figures out how to do a project before even putting himself forward for it. And the root cause of this difference lies in the way our world operate -- the traditional world and the tech world.

In the traditional world, regardless of the business type, you get results simply by putting in efforts. And the more efforts you put, the more results you get. That's why traders sometimes work on Sundays. They know that putting in extra time/efforts on Sunday will generate more results/revenue. That's why salesmen log activities, meetings and calls; and they try to do more so as to generate more sales. But in the tech world it doesn't work that way. Just throwing more programmers at a software project will only make it miss the delivery date. And there's a proven theory for this, Brook's law. There's also a popular book dedicated to explaining this, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. That's how widely known the principle of more efforts doesn't equal bigger results in the tech world. Once you do a tech stuff on a professional level, it's no longer the hours you log at it that matters but the thoughts you put into it. And that's why you'll rarely find a (true) tech guy going after a job/contract he knows nothing about. But you will constantly find non-tech people pursuing jobs/contracts they know nothing about, believing that they will go hire the guys who will do the job. In their world, efforts is all that matter. And when things don't work out they can always blame the tech guys. But when a tech guy wins the bid for a job, heads the technical team working on the job, and then fails, who is he going to blame?

Most tech guys take the consulting pathway to entrepreneurship. They, first, become an expert at something before trying to strike out on their own. They don't just jump into the entrepreneurial pool, getting a contract first before acquiring the competence to get it done. And that's why they are less entrepreneurial.