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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Wow, talk about assuming correlation implies causation.

I think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.

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So true! Around 1980, chemical and petroleum engineers made the best CEOs, because oil prices were high and energy companies had the highest stock-market valuations.

Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.

This might be true but I don't see why it is obvious, especially when it's not even commonly assumed that the best person to run a software company is a software engineer.

The article only considers founding CEOs. Tech founders are mostly software majors.

I'm the author bawolff, and I completely agree that the success of software engineers as CEOs is correlation, not causation. The likely cause is that software engineers learn to discover value by running value experiments. Zuckerberg and Bezos are well known for their value experiments in production. I believe that the nature of pursuing new value, in effect, taught them this practice. And to the comment below, when it comes to oil, new value in the form of oil fields is also discovered. Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value, iterating in software is also prospecting for value. It's just that unlike oil, you can use software to prospect for all kinds of value very quickly.

If you gave a list of non-software companies that had software engineers as their CEOs, i'd give this some credence, but as is this is kind of rediculous when you have a giant elephant in the room confounding factor that you're pretending doesn't exist.

> Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value

So is literally everything.

Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest

Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease.

Etc

Okay, but this is a function of the medium not of the people. Crafting successful feedback loops has defined great leaders across industries for hundred(s) of years. A bent toward experimentation is not something that software engineers possess. It's a trait that great leaders build into their businesses.

In my circles, I see little to no experimentation done in the computer field, much to my dismay. We already have the best simulator for the universe, itself.

You might not be understanding his/her point...

The likely cause is that tech companies are the most recent space for capital innovation and profit, so have the hottest stocks right now

Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)

When software is eating the world, this is exactly what we should expect to see.

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