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tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am s

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team than any tech innovation, and the input you do have can be hard to relate to the shared business context of the CEO/COO/CFO. So I went and got an MBA (Harvard). Now I know exactly how to frame (and improve!) my non-technical contributions, have much more context on what "success" means, and have the credibility to really be a part of the senior team. Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. You have to leave code behind at a certain point and spend your time on people/financial/planning issues. The ultimate end of that road is CEO, and not everyone wants to go there. Also, I'd really misdiagnosed my malaise. What I'd been missing was not strategic input, but the opportunity to build things. To weave together inspiration and ideas into innovation and growth. I love building things and challenging assumptions, it fulfills me. Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :)

sailfast 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. While I certainly see evidence of this in the workplace, I also see that this kind of leader would be exceptionally valuable to any organization. Do you find that the issue here is that companies already at scale have separated concerns so highly that the management skills are more valued (so technical leaders go to startups / smaller places) or is this really just because us technical people like to build things more than manage things? This is super interesting input - I think that on this answer, depends a lot of the future of companies, but also where technical folks can and should target. (Although you mention CEO which, I mean, that's a leadership role too hehe)
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  > While I certainly see evidence of this in the workplace, I also see that this kind of leader would be exceptionally valuable to any organization. You'd think!! I have a few theories as to why this is so: The most charitable interpretation is that, since technically competent business leaders are so incredibly rare (set aside that every engineer thinks they can do it), there's no design pattern for that leader. Ownership is ritually divided into COO/CTO/CFO, and of those CTO is linearly defined. Technical leaders are excluded from non-technical discussions by default, and norms are extremely hard to break. ^ This is why I recommend against great Engineers doing an MBA. There's just no role at Amazon/Google/etc. for that profile beneath the VP level, reporting trees for engineers/business branch at the second tier and never meet thereafter. A different perspective is that in a sufficiently technical organization (ie: everyone, these days), technology is a giant black box to the rest of the leadership team. It's a big part of the budget and a massive component of success, yet completely opaque and unfamiliar to someone who rose up through sales/marketing/etc. In their minds, the CTO already has an outsize impact, and surrendering to them more scope is scary.
  - sailfast 10y ago
    Thanks - this is really interesting and thought provoking feedback.
  - tamana 10y ago
    Why would a techie want a MBA job below VP level? Most don't want to be advertising account managers or business analysts either. Does that matter?
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      tl;dr: If there's no reason to get an MBA as a promotion-track engineer, then not only will none of your promoted engineers will have MBAs, none of your promoted MBAs will have practical experience being a great engineer. They wouldn't, of course. And that's really the problem. If you don't have mid-level technical managers with MBAs, you don't get to promote/hire VP-level technical MBAs. An MBA does teach a lot of valuable skills. As many smart technical founders/leaders have crashed up against the corporate rocks of running a major division/initiative as business leaders failed due to distance from execution. Right now though there's no role, and no opportunity, for a mid-tier (post-MBA) capital-E engineer. So there will be no MBA-toting, engineering-aware VPs. Without business-fluent engineers (or engineering-fluent business folks) companies are deprived of interdisciplinary innovation. You get financial programs which ignore technical needs, and great inventions which don't have a market. Promotion which doesn't represent reality and deals which can't be executed. Most of the frustration engineers have with business people is not that business folks can't do business well, but that they don't do so understanding the underlying technology. And until there's a reason to want a techie MBA (or business-y Eng) at a sub-VP level, this isn't going to get better.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Given your technical background, be sure to involve someone with a strong sales/marketing point of view whether that's a cofounder, investor, or friend. Moreover make sure it's a relevant point of view. For example, someone with a great b2b pedigree won't necessarily add the most value if you're starting a consumer focused company. Most importantly, best of luck to you -
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  tl;dr: My first hire, and ideal cofounder, would be a really great CFO. (When I frame myself as a technical leader, there's a quick assumption that I don't grok sales/marketing. If I introduce myself as a "Harvard MBA & angel investor", there's an immediate conclusion that code is beyond me... Nice to know that, when both are presented, the engineer wins. :) ) That said, sales is one of the easiest areas to hire for. I respect sales very much, most of my co-founders in the past have come from sales and I've learned a lot from them. But enterprise salespeople pay for themselves, have less/no expectation of equity, and expect to bounce from job to job every year. At some point I'll need a sales leader to manage a sales team (subdivide industries/regions, hire/fire, etc.) But that's not a founder-level role. The biggest thing I need is going to be a great CFO. I'm getting into the logistics business (software eats fulfillment?), which is pretty capital-intensive. Debt is a better instrument for this than equity, but I have neither the time nor the temperament to secure that. I'm broadly anti-VC, but may end up pitching primarily for the credibility with lenders & institutional investors.
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    +1!
  - pcl 10y ago
    OT, but I greatly appreciate that you put your post summary at the top instead of at the bottom. I don't need a tldr summary at the end... Was that a result of learning about executive summaries in your MBA program, or just something you picked up along the way?
    - 10y ago
contingencies 10y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for the anecdote and good luck.
knodi123 10y ago
> Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Best of luck!
aerovistae 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Cough Elon Musk
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  Cough solo founder. > The only truly successful technical leader is the founder,
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    +1!
  - aianus 10y ago
    Elon Musk wasn't even a founder at Tesla, let alone 'solo founder'. He joined as financier/chairman after R&D had begun and then took over as CEO some time after that.
    - dasil003 10y ago
      Good point, but it's not meaningful to the GP's original point. Self-made billionaire financiers write their own ticket, whether they are technical or not is merely a footnote.
unhappycto 10y ago
Thanks for the reply. I had thought of doing an MBA a couple of years ago, albeit fleetingly. I don't think that will solve things in this current situation though :) I also agree that perhaps my issue is more of building things rather than strategic input. After all, when building things for my own business is when I'm most happy so it's good to hear a similar conclusion. Good luck with your new venture!
personjerry 10y ago
Any idea what your new venture will be?
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  Oh sure. Software eats fulfillment, basically. Currently FBA (http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.htm http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht...) is a 3B$ business without any competitors. There are good reasons for that: it's capital-intensive, technically/operationally/managerially challenging, and can only really be learned by doing. I've just finished architecting & implementing a 30k package/day distribution system from scratch, I know I can do better. FBA is a surprisingly low bar to clear (they're mathematically/structurally constrained), and the industry hasn't really improved since the 90's. And with the right structuring it can be mostly funded through debt & advance receipts. Basically, I'm going to pick up where FlexPort (https://www.flexport.com/ https://www.flexport.com/) leaves off (literally! Ha, logistics joke!) Except in an even less sexy vertical. :)
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    I would have thought UPS - and similar companies - would be considered competitors, which are no small fries! But, perhaps I'm looking at the wrong layer of the onion? And perhaps the layer you're referring to/hoping to operate in is n degrees removed from that. In any case, good luck! +1!
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      tl;dr: different markets & different needs It's not hard to get a dedicated fulfillment service once you've hit a decent size (say ~10k/day). But it's a very intensive sales process with long-term commitments. They also tend to be both opaque and hard to integrate with other systems. Most use end of day EDI (yes, the 30yr old standard), some of the more "modern" ones have multiple drop times/day. So major fulfillment providers (not UPS, which doesn't do fulfillment; but FedEx/Rakuten/etc.) are both inappropriate for fast-growing, flexible or seasonal loads, and don't support innovation in customer service for eCommerce companies. FBA is a much more modern (and extremely successful!) service, but is only cost-effective if you're selling on Amazon. Their 3rd-party, non-branded service is not only prohibitively expensive but feature-light and under-developed.
tamana 10y ago
? The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO. A mid/senior person at a big company is similar to a CxO at a small company.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  > The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. This is false, and also misses the point. I went through two recruiting cycles at HBS (Harvard Business School), which is one of the largest (~1000/yr) and most representative business schools. I did not see a single position advertised which required actual engineering experience. I was also one of three people (in 1000) who had a job before school which required writing code. There were plenty of companies which would have loved to hire a solid engineer, but the job they'd be hired into would neither require nor use those skills. I could certainly go work in Product Management at Google, for instance; but why would I want to? My better path to VP at Google would be as a coder (if I wanted to be a VP at Google). > There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO. There is 1 CTO in the HBS alumni database. There are more than 36,000 CEOs. CEO-CTO is probably ~2:1 in the real world. ps: data mining the HBS Alumni database is fascinating, btw!
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    +1!
  - vasilipupkin 10y ago
    Strongly doubting the assertion that it is easier to become a Google VP as a coder than a product manager. Product managers are responsible for the product and its P&L which is much more suited as training ground for VP than being a coder, in my opinion
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      A better 1:1 comparison is PM vs lead Engineer. They're at similar levels in the hierarchy. There are idiosyncratic and systematic ways to consider this statement. My personal belief is that it would be an easier path because I know myself to be very good at building products and supporting engineers, and relatively less interested in market research & networking. In a more general sense, it's pretty easy to get a rough count of the number of product-oriented VPs at Google on LinkedIn, then count how many have PM backgrounds and how many came up through engineering (divided by the ratio of PMs to engineering managers). I did that analysis two years ago when I was considering Google, and it came up strongly on the side of engineer. I'd be particularly interested to know if this has changed since, or if internal/better data suggests otherwise!
goshx 10y ago
It's funny how you hit the MBA nerve there. I've been considering going that route, but with the intention to get more involved with people from different backgrounds than anything else. I don't want the MBA to move away from my position as CTO, but to improve my abilities in other areas of the business and networking purposes. Would you still recommend not getting the MBA in that case? This is all in preparation to take the entrepreneur route, while I can't simply take it right now.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Do you want to stop coding/building things, and instead build teams & business? Then do an MBA. There really is a lot to learn; it's not the irrelevant piece of paper it's often made out to be. The usual caveats apply (right school/program, work hard, etc.) Do you want to be a higher-impact engineer? Don't do it. Apply to YCombinator, build more part-time projects, start a "sell stupid shit" on eBay company and learn the ins & outs of incorporation/taxes/financial tracking/etc. Getting better at business & networking is a great idea, but an MBA for that alone is overkill.
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    > An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Holy smokes! If your statement is true, then here's me running in the opposite direction of that mba. +1!
    - eitally 10y ago
      Think about it: MBAs learn non-engineering skills, so how could it possibly be otherwise. If you get an MBA and continue engineering work, then by definition you're not leveraging your MBA, and vice-versa. That's a huge simplification, of course and I don't completely agree with the OP, but that's the gist of her point.
      - DelaneyM 10y ago
mxuribe 10y ago
+1!
rms_returns 10y ago
> You have to leave code behind at a certain point and spend your time on people/financial/planning issues As an exceptional case, you can get into a large tech company like Google/Microsoft and thus enjoy a higher position while still being able to do what you enjoy (coding and technical stuff). I was faced with this same dilemma when I quit my day job in a large multinational company and started freelance programming. As you said, there are career roadblocks in most companies when you are more technically inclined than managerial. Besides, there is no large employer like Google/Microsoft/etc. in my country, so freelancing is my only option.
shdon 10y ago
DelaneyM, your posts here, especially when combined, would make a pretty compelling article in their own right. Please consider writing them into a blog post and submit that to HN as well.
- skewart 10y ago
  I second this! I would love to read a blog post - or a series of them - where you explain your thoughts in more depth.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  Thanks! But the world (particularly our corner of it) is full of smarter people saying more interesting things. I feel like the best way I can contribute is not distracting readers from doing.
  - shdon 10y ago
    I think you underestimate yourself. Or overestimate other people :) There are plenty of uninteresting or non-useful comments posted everywhere, including on HN. Yours in this thread are both interesting and useful.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    As a counterpoint, I use these distractions to center myself. There likely are smarter people saying more interesting things, but HN's feed also sometimes has things like "Java StringBuffer and StringBuilder performance". I would much rather read about a "TechMBA/TMBA/TemBA/STEMBA" proposal than about performance of utilities of strings in a language I don't use.
curiousDog 10y ago
Your career is both fascinating and inspirational. Best of luck with your new venture.
msgerbush 10y ago
This is obviously a personal question, but as someone looking to transition from an engineer to more of a technical business leader, what would you consider the most direct and fulfilling path? It sounds like the ultimate goal is becoming a CEO/entrepreneur, but do you think the"increasingly unfulfilling" years as a CTO are necessary/unavoidable? How do you continue to get the sensation of building things, as you become further removed from the actual execution? Thanks for your comments here, as an engineer considering an MBA and general career trajectory, this has been really helpful.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  It depends on whether you want to end up in macro or micro business. If ultimately you want to be an entrepreneur, then try to sign on as an early/founding engineer with a qualified and capable business team. You'll learn most of what you need to do it yourself by proximity. Alternatively, consider one of the better incubators/accelerators as a way to draw a living salary while executing over time with support from your peers in the program and mentors. If you want to be CEO of Cisco, suck it up and be a non-building technical leader. Eventually you'll be able to absorb or grow your scope into a profit-centre of the business (engineering is usually a cost centre), and if you excel at that you can climb the rest of the way. This is really the only end goal for which it makes sense to do an MBA.
  - msgerbush 10y ago
    Great, that's exactly what I suspected, but nice to hear from someone who's been through it already. Thanks, again, and good luck with your new venture.
aws_ls 10y ago
>Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Good move. All the best. I totally agree with this statement. For a technical person to become the founder gives the most amount of freedom. I have personally experienced this in my career. Working for corporates, I was often the tech lead of a project, with somebody else to manage the team, and particularly in Indian culture manager role assumes a relatively powerful role, and the tech person, is often frustrated. Even though you may feel, that it will be better off playing both roles, by oneself. On this last point, I feel several tech people, although very able, often lack the confidence to play managerial roles. Have seen a friend who is CTO and very good, playing subordinate to his co-founder who is CEO. I feel he can play both roles, by himself and do it better. But can't help it, if he himself doesn't feel that way. So, if you are feeling frustrated as a CTO, and want to have freedom while being able to get your hands dirty (programming, I mean). Being a founder, or even an equal co-founder should serve you well. If you can make it sustainable, nothing like it. If you can make it sustainable, there is this risk of complacency. You may be too satisfied with just a lifestyle business. But that's another struggle & another story!
tim333 10y ago
>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok
- JOnAgain 10y ago
  Bezos is not highly technical. Very smart, and grasps concepts very quickly, but not highly technical by any stretch.
  - tim333 10y ago
    I wasn't sure about that one and googled him a bit. He actually seems more tech than you might imagine. Apparently bachelor's degree in EE/CS from Princeton, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, worked as a programmer, wrote part of the original Amazon code in C and there was this on Quora: >At Blue he reads every technical memo released to the company. He also participates in weekly reviews, and the more data-rich the presentation the better. He'll stop and analyze every plot and gives feedback to the point you think he knows more about the subject matter than the actual presenter.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  All of those people are founders. My thesis is that there's no place in the world to be hired as an engineer w/ an MBA (which is comparably compensated to and inaccessible to "just" engineers or "just" MBAs), and no place within traditional hierarchies.
  - tim333 10y ago
    Ah - got you. Though I could counter with Satya Nadella who had a degree in Comp Sci and an MBA before joining Microsoft.
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      But he hadn't been a practicing engineer, and never worked in an engineering or technical capacity at Microsoft.
paulsutter 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on? I think you meant to say "there's no place at Dronecorp for a highly technical business leader". It's logical that Dronecorp should hire Harvard MBAs who score high on agreeableness and are skilled at showing each other powerpoints.
- tracker1 10y ago
  See the last statement in the comment, "The only truly successful technical leader is the founder..."
  - paulsutter 10y ago
    Google and other well run companies have skilled technical people at all management levels.
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      I'd love to meet one, or see a job description for such a role.
      - nostrademons 10y ago
        When I was at Google my entire management chain had the title "software engineer" (except Alan Eustace, who officially had the title "VP of engineering" but had a hardware engineering background, and Larry Page, who had the official title of "CEO"). That was 6 levels up, including me. Amit Singhal (who was 3 levels above me and responsible for a department of 2000 people or so) was still titled "software engineer".
- dmitrygr 10y ago
  >So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on? Is this a game of "which of those three does not belong"? If so, too easy...
LCDninja 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. As I understand it, the history of Silicon Valley was written by highly technical business leaders. They might not be writing code, but they're sure providing technical guidance - sometimes on a highly granular level...(e.g. famously Bill Gates micromanaging date/time storage in new language development when MS was a billion dollar company). I contest that if you're highly technical, it's very difficult to step away from that knowledge (especially when you're seeing things going wrong). Not a bad thing? Also - congratulations on becoming a founder! Best of success to you!
tixocloud 10y ago
Congrats on taking that leap of faith. Essentially in the same boat as you and agree on the value of the MBA is in communications. While arguably technical business leaders can significantly help organizations, businesses just don't see that way. I've made the shift to the business side and don't do any coding at all. More time is being spent planning, analysis, presentations and building relationships. I'm also set to start a new venture on my own as solo founder. Good luck!
atmosx 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. You were at MS. How do you call Bill Gates if not highly technical ? :-) That said, I understand what you mean. > Also, I'd really misdiagnosed my malaise. What I'd been missing was not strategic input, but the opportunity to build things. Isn't that exactly what Steve Jobs was doing for a living at Apple (or Pixar)? Again I understand what you're saying, but maybe not all companies/positions are so well defined as you make it sound.
- spinlock 10y ago
  Bill Gates was a drop-out, not an MBA. Steve Jobs was a ... wait for it ... drop-out but also not technical. Steve Wozniack was the technical founder of Apple. If you really want to understand Jobs' talent, think about what Apple did when he left and how they changed when he came back. The technology didn't change that much (sure, Unix, but that wasn't _that_ big of a deal). The key difference is how they sold computers. After Jobs' was forced out, Apple started to copy the MicroSoft strategy: make computers highly customizable. Needless to say, that didn't work for Apple. After Jobs' came back, Apple stopped that strategy and started selling 3 options: good, better, and best. IMO, that's the real key of Jobs' Apple turn-around. He made it easy for people to buy computers. Anyway, from that perspective, Jobs was all sales/marketing and not even close to what you'd consider a CTO.
nibs 10y ago
A study of gifted people (probably relevant to a lot of people here) found that people who run, manage and/or start companies are the most satisfied with their careers: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:281434/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:281434/FULLTEXT0... and that gifted people in most other fields (law, medicine, etc.) as professionals are mostly good at what they do but indifferent about it. Start a company is great advise.
JohnnyConatus 10y ago
I'm an experienced CTO without an MBA but I largely agree. Having an MBA and continuing as a CTO employee doesn't make a lot of sense. I have a decent amount of business knowledge thanks to working at an accelerator, being an early employee at a successful start-up, and consulting. However, most organizations want one thing from their CTO: deliver tech that fulfills the promise of what we sold. Sure, you'll have some product input, but in most cases you will be excluded from overall business strategy other than to answer "when can we have it?", or if you're lucky, "what are our options?" This is true for a number of reasons, including: - Maybe the CTO shouldn't be making strategic business decisions. If it's not a consumer start-up, the CTO is often not the most clued into the market, either for lack of access or because they're so busy managing the delivery of the solution. - Stepping on toes. In a perfect world, no one would get threatened if you see something on someone else's turf and point it out as gently as possible. We don't live in that world. Personally, I will most likely found my own company, knowing fell well that I will be the CEO and that my development tools will change to communication and money management. An MBA could be helpful for this but it's not essential, from what I've seen.
jeffcwang 10y ago
I'm also an HBS grad with a technical background (BS/MS comp sci + 7 years of coding before b-school). While I agree with most of your sentiments, I feel compelled to offer a slightly different view. Regarding your comments around the CTO position, I think that is because HBS didn't pay attention to tech/startups until about 5 years ago (i.e.: Field 3, Startup i-lab, tighter recruiting with silicon valley). I'm guessing that in 10 years, we'll see more as the current batch of students mature in their careers and have the CTO position available to them. Additionally, most of the technical students in my class (myself included) decided to pursue the PM track for the very reason you highlighted -- to have a seat at the table when making significant business decisions. In my current role, I run product, engineering, and operations. I still code (python/flask/node/postgres) but I'm also responsible for the product roadmap and operations (supply chain, recruiting, call center efficiency). I have a direct impact on revenue/managing costs and driving results through the metrics we measure. More importantly, I work directly with the CEO and have even had the opportunity to present to the Board. I feel this wouldn't have been possible with an MBA. tl;dr: An MBA can actually be helpful for technical folks. In looking holistically around product/operations/sales, the actual code is probably one of the less important things in achieving business goals. Take a PM track if you want to have broader impact outside of just dev work (but with the option value to continue coding if you like).
n00b101 10y ago
> Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Hey I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur as well, my last day is June 30th, and I think we live in the same city. Neat!
gspetr 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. There certainly is, but I'll concede there might not be in a random startup. For a counterexample, John Carmack seems to have done well for himself as Oculus CTO, even coding interesting things by himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273235
manigandham 10y ago
Looking at your linkedin background, I see you have some adtech experience. This is perhaps one of the few industries that could actually use this technical manager in the middle of the organization. I'm building a martech company right now and this is exactly type of people I hope to gain, someone who knows how the tech really works while also understanding the needs of the business and our clients to make the right decisions. They don't need to code everyday but having a grasp of how ad serving works, how logging and reporting is done, how attribution occurs through cookies and other identification, etc. would all help to make them more informed and capable at producing value for our clients rather than turning products into undifferentiated mush that add no value, like the rest of the industry. Or maybe I'm just that technical founder who will always have to mix the two disciplines and make the call myself - just wish there was a way to delegate this.

sailfast 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. While I certainly see evidence of this in the workplace, I also see that this kind of leader would be exceptionally valuable to any organization. Do you find that the issue here is that companies already at scale have separated concerns so highly that the management skills are more valued (so technical leaders go to startups / smaller places) or is this really just because us technical people like to build things more than manage things? This is super interesting input - I think that on this answer, depends a lot of the future of companies, but also where technical folks can and should target. (Although you mention CEO which, I mean, that's a leadership role too hehe)

DelaneyM 10y ago
> While I certainly see evidence of this in the workplace, I also see that this kind of leader would be exceptionally valuable to any organization. You'd think!! I have a few theories as to why this is so: The most charitable interpretation is that, since technically competent business leaders are so incredibly rare (set aside that every engineer thinks they can do it), there's no design pattern for that leader. Ownership is ritually divided into COO/CTO/CFO, and of those CTO is linearly defined. Technical leaders are excluded from non-technical discussions by default, and norms are extremely hard to break. ^ This is why I recommend against great Engineers doing an MBA. There's just no role at Amazon/Google/etc. for that profile beneath the VP level, reporting trees for engineers/business branch at the second tier and never meet thereafter. A different perspective is that in a sufficiently technical organization (ie: everyone, these days), technology is a giant black box to the rest of the leadership team. It's a big part of the budget and a massive component of success, yet completely opaque and unfamiliar to someone who rose up through sales/marketing/etc. In their minds, the CTO already has an outsize impact, and surrendering to them more scope is scary.
- sailfast 10y ago
  Thanks - this is really interesting and thought provoking feedback.
- tamana 10y ago
  Why would a techie want a MBA job below VP level? Most don't want to be advertising account managers or business analysts either. Does that matter?
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    tl;dr: If there's no reason to get an MBA as a promotion-track engineer, then not only will none of your promoted engineers will have MBAs, none of your promoted MBAs will have practical experience being a great engineer. They wouldn't, of course. And that's really the problem. If you don't have mid-level technical managers with MBAs, you don't get to promote/hire VP-level technical MBAs. An MBA does teach a lot of valuable skills. As many smart technical founders/leaders have crashed up against the corporate rocks of running a major division/initiative as business leaders failed due to distance from execution. Right now though there's no role, and no opportunity, for a mid-tier (post-MBA) capital-E engineer. So there will be no MBA-toting, engineering-aware VPs. Without business-fluent engineers (or engineering-fluent business folks) companies are deprived of interdisciplinary innovation. You get financial programs which ignore technical needs, and great inventions which don't have a market. Promotion which doesn't represent reality and deals which can't be executed. Most of the frustration engineers have with business people is not that business folks can't do business well, but that they don't do so understanding the underlying technology. And until there's a reason to want a techie MBA (or business-y Eng) at a sub-VP level, this isn't going to get better.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Given your technical background, be sure to involve someone with a strong sales/marketing point of view whether that's a cofounder, investor, or friend. Moreover make sure it's a relevant point of view. For example, someone with a great b2b pedigree won't necessarily add the most value if you're starting a consumer focused company. Most importantly, best of luck to you -

DelaneyM 10y ago
tl;dr: My first hire, and ideal cofounder, would be a really great CFO. (When I frame myself as a technical leader, there's a quick assumption that I don't grok sales/marketing. If I introduce myself as a "Harvard MBA & angel investor", there's an immediate conclusion that code is beyond me... Nice to know that, when both are presented, the engineer wins. :) ) That said, sales is one of the easiest areas to hire for. I respect sales very much, most of my co-founders in the past have come from sales and I've learned a lot from them. But enterprise salespeople pay for themselves, have less/no expectation of equity, and expect to bounce from job to job every year. At some point I'll need a sales leader to manage a sales team (subdivide industries/regions, hire/fire, etc.) But that's not a founder-level role. The biggest thing I need is going to be a great CFO. I'm getting into the logistics business (software eats fulfillment?), which is pretty capital-intensive. Debt is a better instrument for this than equity, but I have neither the time nor the temperament to secure that. I'm broadly anti-VC, but may end up pitching primarily for the credibility with lenders & institutional investors.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  +1!
- pcl 10y ago
  OT, but I greatly appreciate that you put your post summary at the top instead of at the bottom. I don't need a tldr summary at the end... Was that a result of learning about executive summaries in your MBA program, or just something you picked up along the way?
  - 10y ago

contingencies 10y ago

Just wanted to say thanks for the anecdote and good luck.

knodi123 10y ago

> Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Best of luck!

aerovistae 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Cough Elon Musk

DelaneyM 10y ago
Cough solo founder. > The only truly successful technical leader is the founder,
- mxuribe 10y ago
  +1!
- aianus 10y ago
  Elon Musk wasn't even a founder at Tesla, let alone 'solo founder'. He joined as financier/chairman after R&D had begun and then took over as CEO some time after that.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    Good point, but it's not meaningful to the GP's original point. Self-made billionaire financiers write their own ticket, whether they are technical or not is merely a footnote.

unhappycto 10y ago

Thanks for the reply. I had thought of doing an MBA a couple of years ago, albeit fleetingly. I don't think that will solve things in this current situation though :) I also agree that perhaps my issue is more of building things rather than strategic input. After all, when building things for my own business is when I'm most happy so it's good to hear a similar conclusion. Good luck with your new venture!

personjerry 10y ago

Any idea what your new venture will be?

DelaneyM 10y ago
Oh sure. Software eats fulfillment, basically. Currently FBA (http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.htm http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht...) is a 3B$ business without any competitors. There are good reasons for that: it's capital-intensive, technically/operationally/managerially challenging, and can only really be learned by doing. I've just finished architecting & implementing a 30k package/day distribution system from scratch, I know I can do better. FBA is a surprisingly low bar to clear (they're mathematically/structurally constrained), and the industry hasn't really improved since the 90's. And with the right structuring it can be mostly funded through debt & advance receipts. Basically, I'm going to pick up where FlexPort (https://www.flexport.com/ https://www.flexport.com/) leaves off (literally! Ha, logistics joke!) Except in an even less sexy vertical. :)
- mxuribe 10y ago
  I would have thought UPS - and similar companies - would be considered competitors, which are no small fries! But, perhaps I'm looking at the wrong layer of the onion? And perhaps the layer you're referring to/hoping to operate in is n degrees removed from that. In any case, good luck! +1!
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    tl;dr: different markets & different needs It's not hard to get a dedicated fulfillment service once you've hit a decent size (say ~10k/day). But it's a very intensive sales process with long-term commitments. They also tend to be both opaque and hard to integrate with other systems. Most use end of day EDI (yes, the 30yr old standard), some of the more "modern" ones have multiple drop times/day. So major fulfillment providers (not UPS, which doesn't do fulfillment; but FedEx/Rakuten/etc.) are both inappropriate for fast-growing, flexible or seasonal loads, and don't support innovation in customer service for eCommerce companies. FBA is a much more modern (and extremely successful!) service, but is only cost-effective if you're selling on Amazon. Their 3rd-party, non-branded service is not only prohibitively expensive but feature-light and under-developed.

tamana 10y ago

? The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO. A mid/senior person at a big company is similar to a CxO at a small company.

DelaneyM 10y ago
> The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. This is false, and also misses the point. I went through two recruiting cycles at HBS (Harvard Business School), which is one of the largest (~1000/yr) and most representative business schools. I did not see a single position advertised which required actual engineering experience. I was also one of three people (in 1000) who had a job before school which required writing code. There were plenty of companies which would have loved to hire a solid engineer, but the job they'd be hired into would neither require nor use those skills. I could certainly go work in Product Management at Google, for instance; but why would I want to? My better path to VP at Google would be as a coder (if I wanted to be a VP at Google). > There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO. There is 1 CTO in the HBS alumni database. There are more than 36,000 CEOs. CEO-CTO is probably ~2:1 in the real world. ps: data mining the HBS Alumni database is fascinating, btw!
- mxuribe 10y ago
  +1!
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  Strongly doubting the assertion that it is easier to become a Google VP as a coder than a product manager. Product managers are responsible for the product and its P&L which is much more suited as training ground for VP than being a coder, in my opinion
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    A better 1:1 comparison is PM vs lead Engineer. They're at similar levels in the hierarchy. There are idiosyncratic and systematic ways to consider this statement. My personal belief is that it would be an easier path because I know myself to be very good at building products and supporting engineers, and relatively less interested in market research & networking. In a more general sense, it's pretty easy to get a rough count of the number of product-oriented VPs at Google on LinkedIn, then count how many have PM backgrounds and how many came up through engineering (divided by the ratio of PMs to engineering managers). I did that analysis two years ago when I was considering Google, and it came up strongly on the side of engineer. I'd be particularly interested to know if this has changed since, or if internal/better data suggests otherwise!

goshx 10y ago

It's funny how you hit the MBA nerve there. I've been considering going that route, but with the intention to get more involved with people from different backgrounds than anything else. I don't want the MBA to move away from my position as CTO, but to improve my abilities in other areas of the business and networking purposes. Would you still recommend not getting the MBA in that case? This is all in preparation to take the entrepreneur route, while I can't simply take it right now.

DelaneyM 10y ago
An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Do you want to stop coding/building things, and instead build teams & business? Then do an MBA. There really is a lot to learn; it's not the irrelevant piece of paper it's often made out to be. The usual caveats apply (right school/program, work hard, etc.) Do you want to be a higher-impact engineer? Don't do it. Apply to YCombinator, build more part-time projects, start a "sell stupid shit" on eBay company and learn the ins & outs of incorporation/taxes/financial tracking/etc. Getting better at business & networking is a great idea, but an MBA for that alone is overkill.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  > An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Holy smokes! If your statement is true, then here's me running in the opposite direction of that mba. +1!
  - eitally 10y ago
    Think about it: MBAs learn non-engineering skills, so how could it possibly be otherwise. If you get an MBA and continue engineering work, then by definition you're not leveraging your MBA, and vice-versa. That's a huge simplification, of course and I don't completely agree with the OP, but that's the gist of her point.
    - DelaneyM 10y ago

mxuribe 10y ago

+1!

rms_returns 10y ago

> You have to leave code behind at a certain point and spend your time on people/financial/planning issues As an exceptional case, you can get into a large tech company like Google/Microsoft and thus enjoy a higher position while still being able to do what you enjoy (coding and technical stuff). I was faced with this same dilemma when I quit my day job in a large multinational company and started freelance programming. As you said, there are career roadblocks in most companies when you are more technically inclined than managerial. Besides, there is no large employer like Google/Microsoft/etc. in my country, so freelancing is my only option.

shdon 10y ago

DelaneyM, your posts here, especially when combined, would make a pretty compelling article in their own right. Please consider writing them into a blog post and submit that to HN as well.

skewart 10y ago
I second this! I would love to read a blog post - or a series of them - where you explain your thoughts in more depth.
DelaneyM 10y ago
Thanks! But the world (particularly our corner of it) is full of smarter people saying more interesting things. I feel like the best way I can contribute is not distracting readers from doing.
- shdon 10y ago
  I think you underestimate yourself. Or overestimate other people :) There are plenty of uninteresting or non-useful comments posted everywhere, including on HN. Yours in this thread are both interesting and useful.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, I use these distractions to center myself. There likely are smarter people saying more interesting things, but HN's feed also sometimes has things like "Java StringBuffer and StringBuilder performance". I would much rather read about a "TechMBA/TMBA/TemBA/STEMBA" proposal than about performance of utilities of strings in a language I don't use.

curiousDog 10y ago

Your career is both fascinating and inspirational. Best of luck with your new venture.

msgerbush 10y ago

This is obviously a personal question, but as someone looking to transition from an engineer to more of a technical business leader, what would you consider the most direct and fulfilling path? It sounds like the ultimate goal is becoming a CEO/entrepreneur, but do you think the"increasingly unfulfilling" years as a CTO are necessary/unavoidable? How do you continue to get the sensation of building things, as you become further removed from the actual execution? Thanks for your comments here, as an engineer considering an MBA and general career trajectory, this has been really helpful.

DelaneyM 10y ago
It depends on whether you want to end up in macro or micro business. If ultimately you want to be an entrepreneur, then try to sign on as an early/founding engineer with a qualified and capable business team. You'll learn most of what you need to do it yourself by proximity. Alternatively, consider one of the better incubators/accelerators as a way to draw a living salary while executing over time with support from your peers in the program and mentors. If you want to be CEO of Cisco, suck it up and be a non-building technical leader. Eventually you'll be able to absorb or grow your scope into a profit-centre of the business (engineering is usually a cost centre), and if you excel at that you can climb the rest of the way. This is really the only end goal for which it makes sense to do an MBA.
- msgerbush 10y ago
  Great, that's exactly what I suspected, but nice to hear from someone who's been through it already. Thanks, again, and good luck with your new venture.

aws_ls 10y ago

>Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Good move. All the best. I totally agree with this statement. For a technical person to become the founder gives the most amount of freedom. I have personally experienced this in my career. Working for corporates, I was often the tech lead of a project, with somebody else to manage the team, and particularly in Indian culture manager role assumes a relatively powerful role, and the tech person, is often frustrated. Even though you may feel, that it will be better off playing both roles, by oneself. On this last point, I feel several tech people, although very able, often lack the confidence to play managerial roles. Have seen a friend who is CTO and very good, playing subordinate to his co-founder who is CEO. I feel he can play both roles, by himself and do it better. But can't help it, if he himself doesn't feel that way. So, if you are feeling frustrated as a CTO, and want to have freedom while being able to get your hands dirty (programming, I mean). Being a founder, or even an equal co-founder should serve you well. If you can make it sustainable, nothing like it. If you can make it sustainable, there is this risk of complacency. You may be too satisfied with just a lifestyle business. But that's another struggle & another story!

tim333 10y ago

>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok

JOnAgain 10y ago
Bezos is not highly technical. Very smart, and grasps concepts very quickly, but not highly technical by any stretch.
- tim333 10y ago
  I wasn't sure about that one and googled him a bit. He actually seems more tech than you might imagine. Apparently bachelor's degree in EE/CS from Princeton, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, worked as a programmer, wrote part of the original Amazon code in C and there was this on Quora: >At Blue he reads every technical memo released to the company. He also participates in weekly reviews, and the more data-rich the presentation the better. He'll stop and analyze every plot and gives feedback to the point you think he knows more about the subject matter than the actual presenter.
DelaneyM 10y ago
All of those people are founders. My thesis is that there's no place in the world to be hired as an engineer w/ an MBA (which is comparably compensated to and inaccessible to "just" engineers or "just" MBAs), and no place within traditional hierarchies.
- tim333 10y ago
  Ah - got you. Though I could counter with Satya Nadella who had a degree in Comp Sci and an MBA before joining Microsoft.
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    But he hadn't been a practicing engineer, and never worked in an engineering or technical capacity at Microsoft.

paulsutter 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on? I think you meant to say "there's no place at Dronecorp for a highly technical business leader". It's logical that Dronecorp should hire Harvard MBAs who score high on agreeableness and are skilled at showing each other powerpoints.

tracker1 10y ago
See the last statement in the comment, "The only truly successful technical leader is the founder..."
- paulsutter 10y ago
  Google and other well run companies have skilled technical people at all management levels.
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    I'd love to meet one, or see a job description for such a role.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      When I was at Google my entire management chain had the title "software engineer" (except Alan Eustace, who officially had the title "VP of engineering" but had a hardware engineering background, and Larry Page, who had the official title of "CEO"). That was 6 levels up, including me. Amit Singhal (who was 3 levels above me and responsible for a department of 2000 people or so) was still titled "software engineer".
dmitrygr 10y ago
>So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on? Is this a game of "which of those three does not belong"? If so, too easy...

LCDninja 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. As I understand it, the history of Silicon Valley was written by highly technical business leaders. They might not be writing code, but they're sure providing technical guidance - sometimes on a highly granular level...(e.g. famously Bill Gates micromanaging date/time storage in new language development when MS was a billion dollar company). I contest that if you're highly technical, it's very difficult to step away from that knowledge (especially when you're seeing things going wrong). Not a bad thing? Also - congratulations on becoming a founder! Best of success to you!

tixocloud 10y ago

Congrats on taking that leap of faith. Essentially in the same boat as you and agree on the value of the MBA is in communications. While arguably technical business leaders can significantly help organizations, businesses just don't see that way. I've made the shift to the business side and don't do any coding at all. More time is being spent planning, analysis, presentations and building relationships. I'm also set to start a new venture on my own as solo founder. Good luck!

atmosx 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. You were at MS. How do you call Bill Gates if not highly technical ? :-) That said, I understand what you mean. > Also, I'd really misdiagnosed my malaise. What I'd been missing was not strategic input, but the opportunity to build things. Isn't that exactly what Steve Jobs was doing for a living at Apple (or Pixar)? Again I understand what you're saying, but maybe not all companies/positions are so well defined as you make it sound.

spinlock 10y ago
Bill Gates was a drop-out, not an MBA. Steve Jobs was a ... wait for it ... drop-out but also not technical. Steve Wozniack was the technical founder of Apple. If you really want to understand Jobs' talent, think about what Apple did when he left and how they changed when he came back. The technology didn't change that much (sure, Unix, but that wasn't _that_ big of a deal). The key difference is how they sold computers. After Jobs' was forced out, Apple started to copy the MicroSoft strategy: make computers highly customizable. Needless to say, that didn't work for Apple. After Jobs' came back, Apple stopped that strategy and started selling 3 options: good, better, and best. IMO, that's the real key of Jobs' Apple turn-around. He made it easy for people to buy computers. Anyway, from that perspective, Jobs was all sales/marketing and not even close to what you'd consider a CTO.

nibs 10y ago

A study of gifted people (probably relevant to a lot of people here) found that people who run, manage and/or start companies are the most satisfied with their careers: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:281434/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:281434/FULLTEXT0... and that gifted people in most other fields (law, medicine, etc.) as professionals are mostly good at what they do but indifferent about it. Start a company is great advise.

JohnnyConatus 10y ago

I'm an experienced CTO without an MBA but I largely agree. Having an MBA and continuing as a CTO employee doesn't make a lot of sense. I have a decent amount of business knowledge thanks to working at an accelerator, being an early employee at a successful start-up, and consulting. However, most organizations want one thing from their CTO: deliver tech that fulfills the promise of what we sold. Sure, you'll have some product input, but in most cases you will be excluded from overall business strategy other than to answer "when can we have it?", or if you're lucky, "what are our options?" This is true for a number of reasons, including: - Maybe the CTO shouldn't be making strategic business decisions. If it's not a consumer start-up, the CTO is often not the most clued into the market, either for lack of access or because they're so busy managing the delivery of the solution. - Stepping on toes. In a perfect world, no one would get threatened if you see something on someone else's turf and point it out as gently as possible. We don't live in that world. Personally, I will most likely found my own company, knowing fell well that I will be the CEO and that my development tools will change to communication and money management. An MBA could be helpful for this but it's not essential, from what I've seen.

jeffcwang 10y ago

I'm also an HBS grad with a technical background (BS/MS comp sci + 7 years of coding before b-school). While I agree with most of your sentiments, I feel compelled to offer a slightly different view. Regarding your comments around the CTO position, I think that is because HBS didn't pay attention to tech/startups until about 5 years ago (i.e.: Field 3, Startup i-lab, tighter recruiting with silicon valley). I'm guessing that in 10 years, we'll see more as the current batch of students mature in their careers and have the CTO position available to them. Additionally, most of the technical students in my class (myself included) decided to pursue the PM track for the very reason you highlighted -- to have a seat at the table when making significant business decisions. In my current role, I run product, engineering, and operations. I still code (python/flask/node/postgres) but I'm also responsible for the product roadmap and operations (supply chain, recruiting, call center efficiency). I have a direct impact on revenue/managing costs and driving results through the metrics we measure. More importantly, I work directly with the CEO and have even had the opportunity to present to the Board. I feel this wouldn't have been possible with an MBA. tl;dr: An MBA can actually be helpful for technical folks. In looking holistically around product/operations/sales, the actual code is probably one of the less important things in achieving business goals. Take a PM track if you want to have broader impact outside of just dev work (but with the option value to continue coding if you like).

n00b101 10y ago

> Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :) Hey I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur as well, my last day is June 30th, and I think we live in the same city. Neat!

gspetr 10y ago

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. There certainly is, but I'll concede there might not be in a random startup. For a counterexample, John Carmack seems to have done well for himself as Oculus CTO, even coding interesting things by himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273235

manigandham 10y ago

Looking at your linkedin background, I see you have some adtech experience. This is perhaps one of the few industries that could actually use this technical manager in the middle of the organization. I'm building a martech company right now and this is exactly type of people I hope to gain, someone who knows how the tech really works while also understanding the needs of the business and our clients to make the right decisions. They don't need to code everyday but having a grasp of how ad serving works, how logging and reporting is done, how attribution occurs through cookies and other identification, etc. would all help to make them more informed and capable at producing value for our clients rather than turning products into undifferentiated mush that add no value, like the rest of the industry. Or maybe I'm just that technical founder who will always have to mix the two disciplines and make the call myself - just wish there was a way to delegate this.