Didn't Steve Ballmer start off at MSFT essentially in a biz ops role, supporting execs when the company was super small? Interesting how he became technical as the company grew. Pretty rare.
> Ben: He's gregarious. Anyone who's ever met Steve or seen a video of Steve, you are well aware that this man has a presence. But the thing that people don't know about him is he is so unbelievably analytical. Steve is the guy that outscored Bill Gates on the Putnam exam.
> as either exclusively technical or nontechnical
This applies outside of tech or generally in any role e.g. if you're a backend engineer they assume you don't know frontend or if you're a marketing specialist you're not good at sales.
I never get it either. We're people not machines but most people have this assumption like we're a game character - you get a job / trait and that's it.
Almost everything is technical if you focus on it long enough, because almost everything is complicated.
This is because almost everything interacts with the real world, which is hellishly complicated and detailed.
PS: Recruiters generally come from the same cloth as car sales and sports, so they're not usually going to be the sharpest pencils in the drawer.
Aren't you committing a similar mistake here, saying that recruiters can only recruit? At my former job one of the recruiters was an engineer for 20 years. He said he just wanted to do something different after all these years.
GT?
Yes, business manager.
> Interesting how he became technical as the company grew.
That's not clear from this. This shows he knew some concepts as part of managing different teams in the company.