Software engineers make excellent CEOs, but few of them think they could do it | Hacker News Reader

Software engineers make excellent CEOs, but few of them think they could do it

tlt21.com

48 pointsLegitGandalf15 comments

There are so many cherry picked data points and unfounded assumptions in this article it's hard to even pick where to start rebutting it. I'll just pick the most obvious one: if you limit your data set of companies to tech, of course you'll find that engineering-oriented CEOs outperform. But tech companies make up only a fraction of the total population of businesses in America.

Also it annoys me when authors don't even try to state what it is CEOs actually do, and what skills are necessary to succeed at those things. If you've got more than few couple dozen employees, it's not engineering...

MSFT stock price graph killed it.

Yea, two things immediately came to mind

(1) Ballmer, whether you like him or not, probably planted at least some of the seeds of the “new Microsoft”

And more importantly:

(2) The tech market as a whole - CEO-engineers or not - has been extremely bullish during that period

This article is not worth the milliwatts of energy consumed to bring to your browser.

Heh, I get that reference

While the content of the article is extremely shallow, I'll comment on why software engineers don't see CEO as a career choice.

Any time I've tried to dive into the world of business / finance I find that it is just a completely different culture in terms of knowledge sharing. The technology culture is one of sharing; knowledge is extremely accessible. If you look hard enough, you can find the contents of a complete CS curriculum on Google. You can then find poignant on-the-job lessons just as easily.

Any time I dive into finance I'm just stuck reading old books and having no seemingly active community to discuss what I've learned with.

I also feel that most science, math, and engineering is much more axiomatic than law and finance. It is easy to guarantee that things don't break when you have reasonable assumptions in an axiomatic system and can deduce the rest, but there are so many exceptions, technicalities, and gotchas in law and finance that I would be afraid of opening either myself or the company I work for up to lawsuits.

I have another hypothesis: People who are experts in the core competence of their companies make better CEOs.

Yet another article that defends this thesis with very little rigor, in my opinion.

Understated hypothesis #1: Software engineers make good tech CEOs because they know the core product/service they are delivering. This is not new to tech - many organizations, such as big traditional engineering (industrial, electrical, aerospace, etc.) or successful law firms are often led by former practitioners (ie, engineers and lawyers respectively). Leaders who know their domain and processes intimately are bound to get better better results on average than those who don't.

Understated hypothesis #2: Engineering likely selects for individuals that are highly intelligent.

All these other ideas of software engineers leading businesses more creatively or efficiently (through process automation, etc) may be hypotheses worth testing, but certainly not foregone conclusions as some of these articles seem to suggest.

I think I'd have much less of a problem if articles like these formulated questions ("could it be that...?") instead of assertions. Discussions would be equally interesting, the style of the text needn't suffer, and I would respect the authors more for their intellectual rigor.

The biggest problem is probably that if you had the patience to sit in a dark room and learn to code for hours on end, you are probably less social than necessary.

This is an unfortunate stereotype, and something that honestly made me loathe other "nerds" in high school.

I often felt alone, as every other computer nerd felt like a caricature, rigid, deeply unfun and unnecessarily draconian in their lifestyle. It was a huge relief to go to university and see other smart people passionate in computers, who would still drink, smoke, be social and confident looking like fools.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. To get really good at programming takes a lot of alone time

That's true. But it has nothing to do with social skills.

Why should it be the case that the best engineers, best machine operators, best accountants, best sales people should have to enter management to further their careers? Isn't it a shame that we force people into management so they can earn more money. Being a CEO means you don't get to code any more, why do that to the best coders?

Software engineers barely know how to write simple code, so i I’m just going to pile on and casually dismiss this article like everyone else.

I’m barely impressed by the job we’re tasked to do.

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