Ask HN: SWEs turned Founders, what technical skills best transfer to startups?
&gt;<i>I often feel that my technical inexperience means I can&#x27;t readily translate my vision into a quality product through code.</i><p>Value to customer and technical complexity of the solution are independent variables. I can&#x27;t tell you how many times customers at huge groups with an army of engineers have been delighted and excited with functionality that took an engineer two hours or an afternoon to implement. At some point, the engineers who tagged along were flabbergasted by the lesson: &quot;Of all that we showed, they were impressed with <i>this</i>?&quot;<p>&gt;<i>Possible practices&#x2F;skills I&#x27;ve identified so far include: Clean&#x2F;Idiomatic Code, Test Driven Development, Design Patterns, CI&#x2F;CD, Agile, UX Design.</i><p>None of that matters if you&#x27;re working on the wrong problem. You&#x27;ll have beautiful code with 100% coverage that&#x27;s full of creational&#x2F;behavioral&#x2F;structural poetry that go into a tight CI&#x2F;CD pipeline through many agile sprints and great stylesheets. Only in a coffin. None of this matters if you don&#x27;t get the &quot;job to be done&quot; right. Maybe as a Kata to beat imaginary or compliant adversaries and stay fit.<p>I wrote something a couple of days ago here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25367011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25367011</a>