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Comment by bornhuetter | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a common theme - technical people who also have business skills are more likely to succeed; business people who have technical skills are similarly more likely to succeed.

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Or more generally: it's much easier to excel in the intersection of two (or three) disciplines than to excel in a single discipline.

Programming + Biology. Programming + Economics. Business + Comic book writing. Programming + Business. Cooking + fluency in Japanese & English. You get the idea.

This is a good point. I was thinking in terms of people in specialised roles having broader knowledge, but you are right that there are good opportunities in blended roles. Either way, it's great to have depth in multiple fields.

> business people who have technical skills are similarly more likely to succeed.

Yes, and business people and managers who have technical skill and knowledge possess the advantage that they can detect when programmers are lying to them or exaggerating, and they can schedule realistic programming project times. Nothing is worse than a manager in charge of programming projects who doesn't understand programming.

Absolutely. This is true in many fields, but I think particularly for the software industry. There are so many people in management positions who are clueless about what engineers and software can and can't do.

I think this is a common theme - technical people who also have business skills are more likely to succeed; business people who have technical skills are similarly more likely to succeed.

Exactly. I was fortunate enough to realize this early on in college. Since that realization I've always made the effort to straddle the tech and business side. Programmers, even average ones, have the ability to multiply business effort by orders of magnitude. Look around in any business and even today it's easy to find places were software can help.

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