Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous?

- Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0]

- Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.

- Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me).

That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

View on HN

Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer. From the article [1] you linked, "He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering".

Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.

Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing.

[0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment.

Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.

Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this.

> *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs

Did Wozniak ever hold the title of CEO?

Yes, I did, which is why I find it so disingenuous. I mean, looking at their chart, 7/10 do not have software engineer CEOs. And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple.

"Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup).

Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com type of stuff.

> Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value).

Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.)

They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.

> And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple.

In terms of title? No. In terms of function? Well sure, he's a co-founder.

Co-founder has nothing to do with CEO. Clearly Wozniak was the technical co-founder, not the business co-founder. I have never seen any hint of him being anything but terrible at business.

> Co-founder has nothing to do with CEO.

In a small company, every person has enough influence to rival the CEO and every role overlaps enough that the distinction given by titles is meaningless inside the company. Mainly the distinction given by titles determines how people market themselves outside the company where the dividing roles will appear clear for marketing purposes, which they are not in reality.

I think cracking the JEE at that time was clearly correlated to him being smart. He was obviously going to be successful wherever he went.

> Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.

The article actually refers to Jobs & Wozniak.

Woz was a cofounder, not a CEO.

"Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer."

My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).

My view as a developer with an MBA is that I got it because the hardest problems I was facing were people/political/business problems rather than tech problems.

I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.

> Google/Alphabet's current CEO

Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.

> Apple's current CEO...

Same thing.

> Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.

True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.

> Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer

He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.

Wozniak was not a software engineer either; he was an EE

With a masters degree in CS...

So you can only be a software engineer if you studied computer science? Not any other highly technical degree that's regularly hired into software engineering positions?

As were most software engineers in those days? It would be a while before CS and specific software software related fields of study took off

Even today, most EEs at e.g. CPU companies have jobs which are more CS than EE.

Similarly not a single person graduated in deep learning 2000-2010

Woz was electrical engineer.

Jobs is said to have influenced the choice and use of Objective C at NS significantly - even if he didn’t code, he had enough understanding to guide it. Also his first job at Atari was as a developer, though it’s said that he got Wozniak to do most of it!

The original author of the Mach kernel was the chief of software at NeXT and Apple for some time, so you can at least get up to reporting to the CEO.

>Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.

And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.

>True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.

Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.

>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.

I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.

> Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer

Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

Eric Schmidt was a developer - he wrote lex.

The software Eric Schmidt co-wrote in the 1970s (Lex) was used for decades. For all I know people still rely on it.

Eric Schmidt wrote lex. He was an engineering executive at Sun. His background is absolutely as a software engineer.

People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".

Furthermore, IMO there are a ton of questionable assumptions littered throughout the article.

The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.

Agreed. A plausible explanation for why the largest companies are tech companies is low marginal cost of replication combined with widespread appeal combined with network effects and IP moat which confers monopoly margins.

Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins.

The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.

I do, but for slightly different reasons.

Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure.

Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling.

And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.

"Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous?"

Yes.

The original HN title was something like "Software engineers make the best CEOS, if measured by market cap".

Yeah, this seems more like "why are software companies more successful". Looking at only the top 10 companies then speculating seems like a waste of time, why not just omit the data entirely at this point?

Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well.

Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer.

Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.

Then they should revise the title to "Software engineers make the best founders."

To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;).

I mean, read this:

> After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders.

What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices"

This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.

To your note on Bezos, this section of the article is what really juxtaposed nicely for me with your comment on Bezos not coding:

>So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes.

I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.

I'm the original author, value is the organizing force of secular society in my opinion.

Read the potential value portion of article or read further about my understanding of value here: https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76

"Economic value is also theorized to be the universal organizing force of secular society, and the nature of value is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the three dominant value management systems, each having proceeded out of its own particular value state. Individual contributors are often attracted to a particular type of value, and they are therefore intrinsically motivated by the unique properties of that value type. Often, humans perceive their own value to society in terms of their ability to produce or replicate a thing of value such as a meal, or concert, or a manufactured good. Others might perceive their value in terms of their net worth, and creative individuals might perceive their value in terms of their ability to discover new solutions or their ability to create new works of value."

Remains to be seen ??

How many more trillion dollar do you need , to give Tim Cook his due credit for operational excellence

Operational excellence he gets all the credit for, just like Ballmer.

Apple is as much a software ompany as it is a hardware company. MS is much more a software company. Cook is a supply chain guy, and with the majority of Apple manufactirung happening at third parties, the operationa excellence is what makes Cook a great CEO, more so because he seems to understand all the other sides of the business as well.

How does it remain to be seen with Tim Cook. Cook is and has been knocking it out of the park on all fronts from product strategy to share price.

I think it took a while for the Ballmer effect to kick in at Microsoft. Organizations have creating new things baked into their DNA, and it does resist corrosion. So I am curious to see if Cook can avoid squelching that like Ballmer.

Operations is great to have and Cook is really good at it. Focus on ops can destroy the creative process though.

I figure another 8 years and we'll know for sure (Ballmer clocked in at 14). I look forward to being wrong, Cook is a great human being.

The M1 chip and moving Jony Ive on points towards Cook being in a different league to Ballmer.

Also Microsoft lost all relevance in being a mobile phone platform under Ballmer. I can't think of a similar blunder from Cook, maybe losing mindshare from creative professionals, but that's a much smaller market that Apple could be making a comeback in.

At the same time Azure was started under Ballmer, which was important in Microsoft's reinvention and repositioning.

Now if only Cook could reinvent the autocorrect feature.

Haha, in this case it was Sundar Pichai's fault ;)

Fixed the typo.

Not just Ive, but Forstall too. That's gotta have taken guts.

He made some bad exec hires too (Mark Papermaster and John Browett) but he also fired them quickly.

> I think it took a while for the Ballmer effect to kick in at Microsoft.

Tim Cook is about 2/3rds through of Ballmer's tenure. If you were to take a bet today, do you see Tim Cook doing the direction of Ballmer?

Cook is 10 years into his tenure at Apple. Since Ballmer took over in 2000, we can look at the period between 2001 and 2011 for comparison.

During that time, their stock price fell at least 10%. The launch of Windows Vista was bungled (XP outlived Vista). They had a string of failures in the phone market, before finally abandoning it. They had a string of failed acquisitions, including Nokia. Remember the Microsoft Stores?

Azure was the only real lasting success acheived under Ballmer.

I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro (my first Apple laptop) because I didn’t have anymore reasons to stay with PC. For a long time I was looking at Macbooks like shiny overpriced gadgets, but with its 20 hour lifetime, great screen and performance, amazing touchpad, while Windows 10 being buggier than Windows 7, I stopped having reasons not to switch.

I always found the "overpriced" theme on Apple hardware curious: it always sounds like people are comparing with "wrong" PC hardware.

Whenever I was buying a new laptop, I've only considered MacBooks because they did one thing I cared about a lot (high resolution displays in portable machines), and they were usually cheaper[1] compared to laptops I went for (lately X1 Carbons: worse performance [lower TDP CPUs], better battery life, worse but acceptable screen, keyboards way ahead — in essense, better keyboards and Linux compatibility + nicer design [personal take :] for worse performance and pricing on par or worse than MacBooks). M1 Macs now win even on battery life too, so it's going to be even harder to stay away from them going forward.

Still, keyboards and Linux compatibility will likely keep me in the HP/Thinkpad business lines for longer, but pricing is not the factor when it comes to choosing Apple computers or not for some jobs.

[1] Configuring a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen brings the Linux + i7-10610U 1.8GHz/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/2560x1440 screen up to $2022 today (down from "retail" price of $3140, which I hope nobody is paying anywhere, ever), and for roughly that money you get a 13" Macbook Pro with i5 ("up to 3.8GHz"), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 2560x1600 13" screen.

Maybe you are right, and Linux desktop improved probably a lot in the last 10 years, I was just very frustrated because I bought a high-end gaming laptop last year with Windows 10, and the system slowed down all the time (for example I had to wait seconds for the start menu after pressing the Windows button).

With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.

> it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer

No that doesn't remain to be seen. Tim Cook is clearly one of the most successful CEOs of all time. Compare Apple now to Apple when Jobs died.

If Apple ends up tumbling down in the next, say, 5 years, with Cook still at the helm, what would that say about Cook as the CEO? To me, Apple seems to be in the Microsoft's home-run stretch where they dominated the market with 99% desktop penetration for a while, but no clear "where next".

Apple certainly won't fall because of their sheer size and momentum (just like Microsoft never did), but we look at things differently at that scale and for a while, Microsoft was "stagnant" and "backtracking".

I don't know how people define "most successful CEOs of all time", but I do know that predicting future is a fool's errand (you can go into statistics and risk evaluation, but here we are talking about one person thus not much room for "statistics": I mean, everyone who's hugely successful but then hugely fails has been mostly hugely successful right until they failed).

If they stumble in five years, which seems incredibly unlikely given that there’s a billion people that love their iphones more than almost anything, he would still probably be the most successful CEO in history if you consider shareholder value created.

Once a software engineer always a software engineer when it comes to management perspective.

Coding really does teach something that I've never learned anyplace else. I've also done just about zero in the arts, so maybe there are some parallels there, I should try music or painting someday to see. I know for sure that math and engineering classes didn't teach me what coding taught me.

And what would that be exactly?

For me it's at least the following:

- Attention to detail

- Control of flow (if this then that) mentality

- More binary thinking

- Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity)

- A lot of frustration tolerance :)

That's at least my experience

I would also add classification and focusing on edge cases.

+ Learning confirmation and other biases

Also iteration.

And recursion :)

+ focus on identifying and relieving bottlenecks

> - Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity)

Probabilistic programming and machine learning do!

The existence of your reply is a case in point that programming teaches "Precision when describing".

I am surprised you did not get that from mathematics, so I wonder what level/type of mathematics did you do?

I can get that you usually don't get it from regular high school mathematics, but even there one should learn to deal with proofs and deducing stuff in a precise, non-ambiguous way, and you have to pay attention to detail.

Coding allowed me to build things with my analytical mind liking precision and patterns, so it's the way for my "mathematical" brain to express creativity.

I did not mention that mathematics did not teach me that, but programming pushed that to a limit that maths didn't - probably because I do not spend 8h a day, every working day doing maths :)

> Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity)

Really? Should we count how many bugs happen due to type conversion, precision errors, off by one etc?

You only reinforcing the point that programming does not allow ambiguity; thus: bugs.

No engineering discipline allows for “ambiguity” at least how you use it here, try building a train or a spacecraft with that level of ambiguity at that point the bugs tend to make things go boom.

Well, I try my best to avoid bugs and be as precise as I can. But hey, I'm only human ;)

I'd argue that it forces you to think clearly about problems. You cannot write a program unless you understand exactly what you want it to do. In contrast typical CEO excels at creating tons of meaningless fluff. Perhaps mathematics or philosophy may have similar effects on people's ways of thinking?

This is not a reply to you personally well not just but to everyone else...

A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require

B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....

Like personally I would wager that most programmers do not understand exactly what they are building when they start, I know I don’t always and I never really met anyone who does so either at least not constantly. You know the general direction then you tend to hack things until they work and optimize and fix edge cases as needed.

We very much can write programs without understanding what we need to do or even how things work otherwise we wouldn’t have bugs that are not hardware errata and even then one can argue that if you truly know what you are doing you plan for hardware failure.

> A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require

What makes you think I underestimate those other disciplines? I do not. The other disciplines tend to focus on tangible rather than on abstraction. Programming (if you want to actually be good at it) requires you to tackle abstractions all day long. My theory is that that ability translates (in some people!) to being better CEO.

> B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....

You are mixing stuff here. I can guarantee you that if you know what you want to build and have the clarity to make the right choices, the hacky project will turn out better than if you don't. Specific development practices (e.g. hacks vs. no hacks) has no relation to personal ability to formulate clear problem statement.

Electrical Engineering is full of abstraction.

Nothing here is exclusive to programming, in fact this isn’t exclusive to engineering even.

Formulating a clear problem statement is applicable to essentially every field and I would argue is probably the hardest thing to master and what most people fail at.

At least personally the most improvement I have experienced in formulating a problem statement had nothing to do with actual technical work but rather when I worked in professional services and had to come up with new service offerings, writing up proposals and managing stakeholders.

Formulating a problem is definitely a soft skill that I would say most purely technical programs don’t teach that well, quite often because you are given the problem statement to solve. This is also true for technical work and why some people might find it hard to progress in their careers. I’ve met plenty of brilliant and highly experienced engineers that suffer from major tunnel vision and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

To iterate different embodiments of ideas with people until something gets traction. I do think that is actually something the arts teachers, but I've done none of the arts so no personal experience to compare.

Yeah I mean they're all CEO's, they don't do software engineering as far as I know. Maybe they once did, 15-20 years ago, and maybe that was their major in uni, but I think it's a bad trend to put a label on people based on what they went to school for. What you pick in school is not your life, and real life / work experience is more educational than the education system (in my experience, but then, I'm college level at best).

So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.

I'm pushing 60 and university is STILL one of the most formative events, if not the most formative event, in my lifetime.

Anything you do in your twenties ends up being the most formative in general.

Sort of my point, saying that what you majored in uni doesn't matter is a bit silly.

Say I majored in physics and went on to get a masters in fine arts and became a world-renowned screenwriter, would you call me a mathematician? That’s argument is equivalent with claims that Cook is a software engineer.

That seems overly reductive.

Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers.

It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science or, like, history?

How about they study, or work in, the field in which they want to be CEO? Damn.

It’s not like history is some useless knowledge. Software engineering is still the new hotness. Give it time and the headline will change to why meteor engineers make the best CEOs while we all pine for the days we sat on top

Hi, I'm the original author. The point of the article is as follows: there is clearly a trend towards top market-cap companies being founded by software engineering CEOs, but why? The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. I believe there are two reasons:

1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on. 2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages.

Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well).

As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.

> The data regarding the trend is pretty clear.

Apparently it's not, see parent comment. Doubling-down and ignoring the criticism is downright dishonest.

8/10 companies on your list are software companies, of those 7/8 have software engineer CEO's. The only thing you've shown is that successful software companies are often led by software engineers. I bet you'll find similar patterns in other industries. Who better to have visionary leadership than an engineer who grasps the industry perfectly.

I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.

Yeah this has nothing to do with engineers having magical brains. This is 100% caused by tech companies being worth gazillions.

Software is eating the world but you are discounting the possibility that this force is simply drawing in the best and brightest; part sorting hat and part black hole pulling in the biggest stars.

Were the railway industrialists all railway engineers?

Cornelius Vanderbilt [1] mastered steam powered shipping before tackling rail. An operator of technical machinery more than a trained engineer but relatively very technical for the 2nd Industrial Age IMO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt

Interesting that you propose their success is based on the value fulfillment cycle which seems like something I would be far more likely to hear from an mba/pm than a software engineer.

IMO, the answer to why the biggest companies tend to be started by software engineers is far far simpler and something you can find in your ordinary econ 101 textbook. Your standard natural monopoly is one which has high fixed costs and low marginal costs such that the first one to dominate the market can usually sustain that because their ongoing costs are low while any new entrant has to pay down the high fixed costs to enter the market. While usually associated with utilities, software matches that pretty well and software companies tend to be started by software engineers.

Writing software (the fixed cost) is extremely expensive as you need to pay a lot to get good engineers and you need a ton of them to handle the complexity associated with the largest markets but once you have written the software, it is relatively cheap to run (the marginal cost). Once one company starts dominating a software market, they can amortize the fixed costs across the greatest number of users and continuously invest to make their software continuously better such that it becomes almost impossible for a competitor to catch up.

You can see this today with the cloud as AWS rakes in billions in profits because they have the most features, biggest head start, and most IAAS revenue while the other companies lose billions (5.6 billion for google last year for example) trying to catch up.

I think that early Amazon employee you're referring to is Paul Davis[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulDavisThe1st

You got it! Thanks :)

I agree with you except about Bezos, the point is not if you work as a developer while you're the CEO, if that was the metric no CEO of a large company would "be" anything.

Definitely. I'd be interested to see how this breaks down for the S&P 500, with more rigor around what constitutes an engineer - maybe have different categories?

There is a common trope around engineers being better managers and CEo in germany as we.. Not software, but engineers in general. Everyody always points at the successfull ones, only to forget that some of the biggest business fuck ups, e.g. VW, happened under engineering CEOs (without MBAs).

It reads like an ego stroke of how awesome software engineers are compared to all the other plebes in the world.

Also: being a monopoly helps.

I think, that is the power of word "many". If the claim was "1% of all CEOs are sw engineers", it wouldn't be that impressive, even though 1% may be actually quite lot of people (many). :)

Yup! Lazy work gets lazy solutions!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com