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Comment by Number157 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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".

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.

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