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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

The more junior you are, the more likely it is that not only can your boss do your job, they can do it better than you can. The more senior you become, the less likely that is to be the case.

How many CEOs could do all of the CFO, COO, CTO, and General Counsel's jobs? Zero.

How many programming team leads can do the junior programmer's job? Basically/hopefully all of them.

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I think the point is not "your boss should be able to do your job better than you can", but "in a pinch, your boss would be able to step in and fill your role if needed".

Even in the case you gave, a good CEO might be able to do that. When you are at the C level, whatever the role is, you're probably going to mostly have to be good at stakeholder management, strategic thinking, listening to your peers and the people working under you and taking good decisions based on the inputs available. A good CEO should be able to step in and apply those skills outside of their domain of expertise, even if they are not going to be the best CFO/CTO in the world.

Technically, it means "your boss should be able to make decisions based on an informed understanding of what the work entails." Without that, management decisions are going to be based on who plays golf with whom, or most shiny consultant or marketer who crosses the threshold.

I've spent some time employed by organizations whose decisions are disconnected from day-to-day reality; train wrecks are fun to watch, but they get less fun when it's your job to ride the train into the brick wall.

The more senior you become, the more you should focus on being one of the leaders yourself instead of staying in individual-contributor mode. If that means you outstrip your own boss's expertise it might mean less personal satisfaction for you (been there done that) but can still improve satisfaction for the team as a whole.

This is not at all my experience (except CFO which has responsibilities not only on paper but in real life, where blame can’t be transferred) but I’m willing to chalk it up to culture differences.

Basically the more you see yourself as a “manager that facilitate work” the easier it is to go higher and the less expertise you need (social expertise exempted). Need something done? Hire someone to do it!

Is there a specialist under you that isn’t replaceable? Better keep him in his position!

I really wish we had what you seem to have though.

I would think the General Counsel has the hardest of those abilities to "I'll just have a go at it."

I think it's probably hard to rank them but being CFO also requires specific hard skills that you can't improvise on

A good COO will also have specific experience and therefore hard skills and easily outclass a general manager that's just winging it... but some operations are simpler than others, so the requirements associated with any of these C-level roles (including CFO and GC) are really on a spectrum

"This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously. ... Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business."

This ... it is a total fantasy to think that the leader(s) of a company are somehow aware of all of the work that is entailed by every job in the company. For really small companies, or junior employees with a line manager, that may be true.

But as you said, the more senior you become, things completely change. There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible.

The comment said that your boss can likely do your job, not that everyone more senior than you can.

>There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible.

Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of small business owners every month.

For sure, for very small companies or small/junior teams who have a line manager.

This also doesn't quite acknowledge that even if you can do all of those functions [in a small business or one-person company] it does not mean you're actually good at those jobs.

It's hard to manage if you don't have a clue about what you're managing. Every estimate looks equally realistic to you. You can't tell lies from the truth. Your own sense of other's performance is limited to easily faked "symptoms" of working hard, like spending a lot of time, or talking in meetings. You don't have to be good at the jobs beneath you to manage them, you just need a clue.

Definitely agree there.

2-person startups often have someone called a CTO.

Similarly, a small business owner might call themself a CEO.

Neither is wrong per-se, but when we're talking about CEOs who have hired a team of executives to run their company, it's most reasonable to assume that GP was not talking about such a small business.

> Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of small business owners every month.

It's an appealing thought, but really they are doing a different job. Vast majority of those thousands of small business owners couldn't effectively step into one of those roles at even a mid-sized corp, let alone all of them.

Apparently actual CEOs can't either judging by the number of them that get golden parachutes for running a business into the ground.

Hahahahahaha, owned in such a concise way. To the moon!

How many programming team managers can do the programmer's job?

In my experience, often, not many. And it is usually a recipe for disaster.

On a large engineering team doing complex work, many engineers can’t even do each other’s jobs without an extended period of retraining

I could imagine CEOs being capable of performing COO and CTO function. It will of course screw up main responsibilities so it is better not to mix.

It's likely that they can do any one of them well (whichever function they came from), but not all of them. They can probably do a passable job at some other one, which means that for at least half of those executives, they have a boss who can't do their job.

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