AquaAnalogue said:
By the way I'm not really either. I struggle with both ideas and their implementations as a rather mediocre CS student. I'm just saying... criticizing people with ideas is a step in the wrong direction.
No one criticized. I said I'm skeptical of people with "big ideas". Skepticism is very healthy. If you run blindly into every idea that comes along, you're going to run out of resources.
The problem with ideas is that everyone has one sooner or later, especially in the computer world, and they all think it's a great idea. The people who believe in their ideas do some work and flesh them out, they'll take the time to create something more and convince people it's worth working on: these are the people you want to work with, and they sadly make up about 1% of the ideas out there. Of the remaining 99%, the idea already exists, or the idea-thinker-upper can't be arsed to help flesh out the idea and can't understand why no one is interested in their "big idea", often both: these people will suck up all your time and then complain about it when the whole thing falls apart because they expect too much.
Yes, when you find that 1/100 idea, run with it and everyone benefits, but when 99% of them are doomed from the start, it doesn't hurt to ask questions. Note I even said that they're usually followed by the requester saying they have no ability to contribute further. Frequently, when I've encountered such big ideas, I encourage the person to put more work into it, build their story, build their world, actually do some work to convince someone their idea is better than the other 99 that come around. I've even got some websites that help with that sort of thing. And then they never come back, or come back with insults because I don't understand their big idea.
Skepticism is good, you'll get burned out working on bad ideas if you aren't.
