Success Quote by Bill Budge

Budge slips a quietly radical product philosophy into a line that sounds like career advice. “It always helps to be a good programmer” reads modest, almost obvious, but it’s really a claim about leverage: in software, the person who can build the thing also gets to define what’s possible. Skill isn’t just employability; it’s authorship. The subtext is a mild rebuke to the era (and every era) where “ideas” and “vision” are treated as separable from implementation. Budge is saying the vision gets sharper when your hands are on the code.

Then he pivots from craft to affection: “important to like computers.” That’s not sentimentality; it’s stamina. Liking the machine means you’ll tolerate the grind of debugging, the obsession with edge cases, the long feedback loop between intention and behavior. It also implies a kind of intimacy with constraints, the way a musician loves an instrument partly because of the resistance it offers.

The final clause widens into market sense: “think of things people would want to do.” Here, the programmer isn’t an isolated wizard; they’re a translator between human desire and computational possibility. “Would want” is doing a lot of work: it’s about imagination tethered to empathy, not novelty for novelty’s sake. Coming from a businessman, the line doubles as a thesis for enduring tech success: competence plus curiosity plus user-centered creativity. Not hype. Not vibes. Just a disciplined way of turning computing power into lived value.