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Comment by davzie | Hacker News Reader

Well, as a thought experiment; should the CEO of the company know how to do every function he or she hires for within their business?

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I worked in construction prior to tech and yes, the General Contractor or Foreman may not know the latest in framing or concrete technology, or even be good at specific tasks like drywall. But they understand the job, can do it if need be, but most importantly can judge the quality.

BillG probably did to a large extent: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

That's specifically software--which is his background. However, while I have no doubt he had and has some high-level familiarity with finance, marketing, and other functions that reported to him as CEO, he probably didn't have the level of deep operational knowledge of those areas that the people hired specifically for those roles did.

I have no doubt he could learn them. He's a smart guy. But the idea that he could drop into any job at Microsoft and excel on Day One is silly.

> Well, as a thought experiment; should the CEO of the company know how to do every function he or she hires for within their business?

No, but they should at least know how to do the job of their SVPs or VPs in their absence. In fact, many times when the SVP departs, their reports are expected to report to the CEO directly.

But if the job of the SVP and VP includes being able to do the job of the people that report to them then doesn’t this require the CEO to ultimately know how to do everything?

There is a depth first and a breadth first traversal aspect to it. Which is why a skilled CEO, presents themselves as a backstop, but simultaneously starts the hunt for a new SVP or an interim SVP.

But even appointing someone new for that role will require the CEO to understand that role very well. They truly can't appoint someone competent in that role without being competent themselves.

A DFS and a BFS both visit every (connected) node, haha.

I don’t think the original comment was saying that it is crucial for somebody to fill in for their reports (that might be true, but it is a different aspect). Rather, they were saying that the manager’s skill set must include the skill-set of the person being managed, in order to evaluate the latter.

I think there’s some truth to this, but there’s also obviously got to be some attenuation factor going on, otherwise we get this “visit every node” problem.

The suggestion of firing every manager that can’t run the test suite seems like it ignores this attenuation factor. It might be a set of command line scripts with funky in-house flags. But they should be able to draw some some of useful conclusions from the output IMO.

Role competency and the ability to assess role competency are two different skills.

No, the CEO needs to know how to clone the repo, read and write E2E test code (basically usage examples), and run the “make test” or whatever to check their (the managers’) E2E tests are running and which properties pass or fail. Otherwise, the “non technical” manager is unwilling (not incapable…just too lazy) to understand the definition of “done” so they’ll be clueless about if the thing is working or not, they’ll be forced to play telephone to add a simple test expectation and then they need to have a meeting to beg someone else to write a function. That’s a leech, not a leader!

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