No manager who leads in demand software engineers will ever be able to change anything unless their reports believe in the vision. The minute things don’t go their way, we can just get another job,

It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.

Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.

- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.

- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.

- Facebook - still founder led

- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”