You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.
There's an obsession with trying to discredit people like Jobs (and their contributions), particularly among the hacker news crowd. Fundamentally it's because most hackers don't understand leadership, marketing, sales, etc.
In this thread you'll see people claim Elon Musk is non-technical. That's bordering on belligerent. A person would have to have avoided the dozens of YouTube interviews where he demonstrates his technical understanding to an elaborate degree. Musk is as technical as Bill Gates was in his post coding days at Microsoft (which spanned the bulk of his time at Microsoft) and I've never seen anyone on HN claim Gates as being non-technical. How it works is simple: I dislike this person, therefore I shall tear them down; I'm unable to be objective about the subject, so I shall be emotional and irrational instead.
He comes across as a guy who really wants to seem deep and cerebral, but his takes are pretty surface level compared to other tech CEOs. He couldn’t even give a high level explanation of Twitter’s “crazy” tech stack without having a meltdown.
Calling Twitter a “crazy stack” is hilariously laughable, serious junior dev energy, that at the very least he should be able to describe to another dev a) whats crazy about it b) what it looks like from top to bottom without insulting people for asking.
He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.
Most code critics of Musk today criticize his poor coding skills due to him unable to migrate his skills from that era to today. But as CEO, he doesn't need to do that. I'm sure he understands the code on a shallow level, which is fine for his role.
We are talking about a guy who didn’t understand how to run a python script that the doge guy sent him.
Who among us WASNT writing crappy little programs in BASIC back then, a language aimed at children and microcomputing amateurs? If he had written a 2.5d raycasting game at 12 in C++, i would be impressed.
I knew guys in the 90s in high school who were writing exploits and cracking major software. For a layperson who isn’t a dev and didn’t run in those circles, it might seem impressive for a kid, but not for any of the kids I knew. Any kid with a basic understanding of programming could copy the code from a computer magazine line by line and edit it slightly . And just because he wrote it at 12 doesn’t mean he has actual coding skills as an adult, he has even said so himself he is not a “hardcore coder”. Considering there are kids like Mike Wimmer who were taking uni level robotics courses at 12, Elon is incredibly mediocre in comparison and only a simp would believe he was some kind of prodigy.
After all, we are talking about a guy who asked his engineers to print out code to show him to prove how productive they were, and who could not explain Twitter’s craaaaazy stack without telling off an actual dev. Who the F thinks the more lines of code you write the more productive you are? How deeply embarrassing.
And that's a really common case.
It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.
The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).
Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.
The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).