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Comment by jedmeyers | Hacker News Reader

The fact that lead positions in a software company are being filled by salespeople and PowerPoint/Excel 'wizards' says a lot about the company, doesn't it? Still remember attending Google's presentation during the 2015 SAP DKOM conference: "Who would like to see some awesome code of what we've done?" -- blank stares from the audience were the replies ...

/ disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this comment are my personal thoughts on the matter.

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Hmmm. I don't think you understand what an executive does. PowerPoint/Excel aren't useful as analytical tools. Their useful as communication tools.

Think of this way. Executives are like engineers whose IDE is PowerPoint/Excel, whose language of choice is human natural language, and who spend their time programming people, not machines.

You're too caught up on the PowerPoint aspect of this story. Most likely it was the guy's ability to persuade that was key. It's people programming, not machine programming that ultimately matters (until the Singularity at least - and then none of what we do matters).

> The fact that lead positions in a software company are being filled by salespeople and PowerPoint/Excel 'wizards' says a lot about the company, doesn't it?

The lead position in a large company (in any industry) generally requires little in-depth knowledge of the product. The lead positions (CEO, CFO) are there to report to boards, shareholders, and regulators. Sure they might know and be interested in the product, but the CFO of MS and Apple generally isn't going to be a software engineer, just as the CFO of Audi or GM isn't going to be a mechanic.

"President of SAP Ariba" is not a CEO/CFO role in this case, it's a lead role in one of the more promising divisions. And I find it funny that you skipped 'CEO of MS' as an example, and started talking about CFOs instead, which are not relevant to this discussion since neither McDermott nor Atzberger are CFOs.

CEO roles might not strictly require a background in the space the business occupies, but sure as hell it helps knowing the difference between a widget and a bulboid, what you can realistically expect widget production to be, what widget consumers expects and so on - in other words, being a "widgeteer". The typical "masters of the universe" view that C-level executives are a separate caste of specialist dung-sellers is what gives modern capitalism a bad name.

But SAP is all about sales.

That isn't true at all, it's about a lot of things depending on the organization. It can be simultaneously "all about sales", or "all about marketing" or "all about software" or "all about verticals" or "all about data science" or "all about cloud" or "all about in memory databases"....

It's a huge company, it's all about a tremendous number of things depending on where your focus is.

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