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You're the Brains and They're the Brawn

How to Hire Great Programmers

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.

—Henry Ford

“Wait, wait wait. How do you expect to create an app if you're not a programmer?” His words pierced through my superficial layers of confidence and left me feeling confused, speechless, and wondering the same thing.

I responded with a quick, defensive, “Hire someone, of course.”

Without a skip of a beat he immediately followed with, “Okay. Well, how do you find those people?”

Again my answer was less than smooth. I remember becoming frustrated and wishing I hadn't bragged about my million-dollar app idea in the waiting room of my doctor's office to an 88-year-old man who didn't even know what an iPhone was. Nevertheless, he was right, and I didn't have the slightest clue what I was talking about. I figured there had to be a way, and I was going to turn over every rock I could to find the answer.

Later that day, I boarded a plane back to Vermont to continue my recovery at my family's house. Fueled by my frustrations with the conversation earlier in the day, I bought a fresh copy of Macworld, a magazine about all things Apple, hoping to gain some insight about apps. I started flipping through it and landed on a quarter page ad that read “TURN YOUR APP IDEA INTO $$$.” It was an ad from a software development ...

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