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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?”

Isn't the answer... most industries? My understanding is that large companies in all domains are heavily populated with executives and managers who came straight out of business school and into a leadership position.

There are those who rise through the rank and file up to the executive position too. I don't know the relative fractions are. But all of those kids who get business and management degrees end up somewhere, right?

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Pre-experience business school (BSc) doesn't launch you straight into leadership positions.

Post-experience business school (MBA) can do that (that's usually leadership of 1-2 kids straight out of school), however to get an MBA you need work experience ... which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere

Note: I am not saying that they have done "basic" work (as in: developing code, flipping burgers etc.). But they definitely are not launched into leadership position without ever having done anything.

> which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere

Even if so, that somewhere doesn't have to be the same industry you go with your first (usually not top-level) leadership position, and neither of those may be the industry in which you end up moving into a top-level leadership position.

The vast majority of managers I've had, whether product or program managers, had very little understanding or experience with the job of programming.

In fact, i suspect more than half of them basically failed upwards. I can't be sure about this, because in many cases I could only see the piss-poor job they were currently doing, but I've experienced the incompetent junior-to-senior manager pipeline up close often enough that I wouldn't be surprised these senior managers were previously incompetent junior managers.

>Isn't the answer... most industries? My understanding is that large companies in all domains are heavily populated with executives and managers who came straight out of business school and into a leadership position.

That's really not true. No one goes from MBA to a CxO leadership position at a large corporation. To pick 3 random examples:

CEO of McDonalds managed one back in 1993 and was the CEO of two other fast food restaurants

CEO of Caterpillar started in 1980 out of college at a company Caterpillar eventually bought.

CEO of CVS started out as a pharmacist at a drug store in that was acquired by CVS in 1990.

Someone in a leadership position typically will have spent decades serving in roles with increasing responsibility in their industry.

Yes a prime example is the NHS. Much management will have no experience attending to patients.

To be fair on the NHS, there aren't enough Doctors or Nurses as it is.. it would be even worse if we started wasting their time managing budgets and KPIs

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