[peteforde]

My father is an engineer, and he always taught me that there's no such thing as a good job half completed. The problem with his perspective is that it is uni-dimensional, and with good reason: if you half-build a bridge, people are going to be sad. He's an engineer and he's got to finish the bridge.

However, my father didn't decide that a bridge was required, nor did he choose the ideal location for the bridge based on urban planning and geographic surveys. And let's be clear — he's not going to be out in the rain, assembling raw materials into a structure either. His job would start with the design and continue with the project plan, and possibly end as a consultant or one of a team of over-seers. He's not finishing the bridge, but his role was necessary to get the project from where it was to where it needed to be when someone else would take over.

Technical projects are often the same. I'm generalizing, but you see a lot of supporting evidence which suggests that you have your visionary, your architect, your builder and your "last 10%"-ers. One person can be all of these things, but almost never all at once on the same project.

What I learned when I came of age was that I am a Starter. I have good ideas and the ability to rally others to a cause. I've evolved the ability to network and communicate. I've forgiven myself for not being a Finisher, because there are lots of people that hate starting and love to finish. There are loads of people who will never start and hate finishing, but they are the core team during the middle.

I suggest that you stop seeing your inclinations as a problem and start thanking your lucky stars that you have a regular flow of potentially great ideas. The main skill you need to develop is your ability to kill off the bad ones early so that you can focus your passion and evangelism on the winners.

Chances are, if you got bored it wasn't going to turn out well anyhow. Listen to what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

http://www.humblepied.com/jessica-hische/

[cletus]

> What I learned when I came of age was that I am a Starter.

The more accurate way to put this is "I am not a Finisher". The argument here is that starting and finishing are two equally valuable skills that are somehow equivalent.

A "Starter" is a fairweather friend. It's easy to start things. Most people like starting things. Note this is different from networking and so forth, which is really a separate skill altogether.

Employers, business partners and investors will look at what you've finished and don't care what you've started. When something is 80% done or when times are tough or it's time to soldier on and run the last mile of the marathon, nobody wants the guy around who says "well, I started, that's my skill but I'm done now, I suggest you find a Finisher".

Not being a Finisher isn't a different skill--it's a character flaw.

[nostrademons]

That's not entirely true. I get called on all the time, within my department at Google, to start things. Usually I'm explicitly forbidden from finishing them (even when I want to), either because they're "good enough" unfinished or because they can be handed off to other people who are not good at starting things.

The ability to look at a vaguely specified problem and say "Okay, here's how we're going to attack it, and here's what we need to build to have something that works" is a very valuable skillset, and not everyone has it.

Now, remember that "finished" is not the same as "launched". Usually, my responsibilities continue up to the point where we can get a product into the hands of users and train the people who'll be maintaining it after me. But there's a fairly large role for maintenance programmers, people who are responsible for little tweaks even though the system is mostly working as desired, and if you're a Starter, there's no reason for you to do that work yourself.

[mydnite]

I think that your job sounds like a prototyper, which to say that your mandate is to develop to a level where others can rebuild it with a point of reference. Hence you're a starter and a finisher.

I have had a similar position.

[peteforde]

You're welcome to your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. Frankly, I wouldn't be employed if anything you said was absolutely true.

My firm is hired to implement concepts as working products. I first help the clients decide whether their idea has legs and help them refine the vision. My team builds out v1 over a period of months, and then we generally hand off to an internal team or another firm that will provide ongoing support. We maintain a pool of excellent resources that excel in maintenance projects but don't have the capacity or interest to be architects.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Starter+the+Architect+the+Deb... was pointed out to me as another recent and good article on the same subject.

Finally, I assure you that successful Starters are excellent networkers and communicators. They have to be, or else the project will never leave the gates.

[sfk]

I'm not talking about you or your company, but a lot of Starters are excellent bullshitters. They have an idea that is the equivalent of "Lets go to the moon" and leave it to others to build a Saturn V rocket. The latter of course is just an implementation detail.

[andrewflnr]

That's a separate problem from that of the OP. We're getting into definitions here, but I wouldn't call your bullshitting Starter a Starter at all. They're just a bullshitter. A Starter worthy of the name should at least draw up some detailed blueprints for the Saturn V. :)

[richardw]

Then they have to finish at least the detailed blueprints, which I imagine is quite a big project in itself. In the end, you'll need someone to finish the 'start'.

I'm a starter, but I know about finishing and I think it's a good skill to learn.

[lusr]

Are you suggesting that the same people need to start and finish? Was Steve Jobs a starter and a finisher? If so do you really believe he could have built the hardware and finished the technical aspects of the project? Or is he a clever starter who found a good finisher - Steve Wozniak? Do you think Woz is both starter and finisher? Based on what I've read in iWoz and Apple Confidential, I think they had two very distinct personalities -- which could be summarized as "Starter" and "Finisher", and were co-dependent. Same thing for Bill Gates & Paul Allen. I would say there are some cross cutting concerns here: (starter vs finisher) vs (technical vs business minded).

In both scenarios you see the same pattern: once things get off the ground, the co-dependency relaxes because the starter can always hire finishers, but not vice versa. Look at who you hear more about: Jobs or Woz? Gates or Allen? There's definitely a difference in their levels of success, and definitely in their personalities. (Not saying it's the only factors, but certainly important.)

[johnfn]

> Chances are, if you got bored it wasn't going to turn out well anyhow. Listen to what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

I agree with most of this post, but I disagree with this sentence. It's very, very easy to trick yourself into believing that a great idea that you're working on is not actually interesting. The problem is that you've been working with the idea so much that you no longer are seeing the thing you're making with fresh eyes.

I know this because it's happened to me over and over again. My most salient example was when I was working on a game a few years ago. I got a month (this was during high school, so development times weren't that long :)) into development and started thinking it was crap, no one was going to like it - things like that. Normally, I would just stop and work on another idea, but this time I did something a bit unusual - I posted the game and asked for feedback from the game community. This was the turning point. They said that it was great, I should keep working on it, and they'd love to play it when it was done.

I finished it. It turned out to be my most successful game, ever. It netted hundreds of thousands of views. It's been on dozens of websites. And to think that I was completely bored and uninterested with it weeks before I finished.

Incidentally, I think this raises a great way of getting good at finishing: show your unfinished work to other people. If it's good, they'll love it, and the self-confidence boost you'll get from that can carry you further. And if they hate it, well, maybe you should be working on something else after all :-)

[peteforde]

I accept that I should have arrived at a less-lazy way of describing the feeling I get when I am able to detach myself from a pet-favourite idea long enough to see its flaws.

It's been my repeated experience that most people are unable to tell the difference between a good idea and a total dud. Certainly feedback helps, but I would also suggest that most people are trained from birth to only say things that they believe you want to hear. The people you know are almost unable to give unbiased feedback, and they can't help it. They don't want to disappoint you.

Learning how to effectively find flaws in your own idea (boredom is an ineffective but common approach) is an incredibly valuable skill. A bad idea well-executed is still bad.

[Schwolop]

Absolutely agree with this advice. It's how I fixed my last unfinished project - launching something completely broken and having people tell you they liked what they saw but could you please fix that one little thing, is a great way to get motivated to fix that thing.

[eat]

I'm sorry, but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a lot of value in being an "idea man", or if you think that there aren't people who have both great ideas and the ability to see them through to completion.

[jarjoura]

To be fair, in my experience there are always the engineers who build the first 80% of something, but then a separate set of engineers who build the last 20%. Of course the original 80% remain part of the team, but they usually take on different supporting roles for managing it.

Starter & Finisher are just different ways of saying that you need engineers who can build the foundations and get the project in a good prototype/working state. Yet, you will need engineers with a different skill set who are meticulous, product driven, detail oriented (however you want to phrase it) to carry it to the finish line.

I'd say both the original 80% team, and the remaining 20% team do about the same amount of work.

Now, just to "finish" my point, I'd say the 80% team definitely finishes their portion. They still have to get it in a state that is demoable and 100% functional.

[peteforde]

I think it's amusing that you didn't finish reading my comment. Or perhaps you disagree that one person starts and finishes a complex project on a regular basis, I'm not sure.

However, I respectfully insist that I have made a successful career of being a Starter.

[nchlswu]

Here's a relevant article that was on HN recently: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Starter+the+Architect+the+Deb...

I think the idea of a person who does things from start to finish his highly romanticized and a lot less comon than whwat you might think. It's great for you to have the abilities to, but I don't think it's a reality to most.

[danielmeade]

Thanks Pete, that's a great analogy. And your sentence "I suggest that you stop seeing your inclinations as a problem and start thanking your lucky stars that you have a regular flow of potentially great ideas" really hits home, you're absolutely right. Thank you.