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A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?”
by devonkim 7y ago
A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most executives in finance have done some form of financial analysis and reporting, construction company owners have almost always done a hard day’s worth of labor, and a lot of directors have had to do some acting / camera work and whatnot. In tech (especially enterprise business verticals) your typical CEO outside Silicon Valley hasn’t ever written a line of code or had to deliver a software project of substantial size. Many are salesmen, marketers, consultants, politicians, etc. and the technology and how it works is just an afterthought. It’s as if executing on the technology is a complete afterthought to investors and frankly they may be right - the barrier to succeed in most enterprise software is probably not your technology as much as how entrenched you already are in the industry you’re working in. This oftentimes bleeds over into supposed tech companies like IBM and HP - your customer base and partners infects your company culture from the top down and drives out engineers. Engineers are far too often excluded because “they’re too pessimistic” and yet every other time I hear about dismissing engineers’ concerns I also hear about tanked projects where it’s a complete mess or situations like the 737 Max. The thing is that the other half is a pretty good gamble.
- komali2 7y agoHmm... The premise is interesting, but c-suites haven't touched the assembly line in many decades, regardless of industry. I have anecdotes of plenty of CEOs from all sorts of industries - ones that never flipped burgers, never played a video game, never pushed steel through a furnace, etc.
- munificent 7y ago> “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Isn't the answer... most industries? My understanding is that large companies in all domains are heavily populated with executives and managers who came straight out of business school and into a leadership position. There are those who rise through the rank and file up to the executive position too. I don't know the relative fractions are. But all of those kids who get business and management degrees end up somewhere, right?
- DavidHm 7y agoPre-experience business school (BSc) doesn't launch you straight into leadership positions. Post-experience business school (MBA) can do that (that's usually leadership of 1-2 kids straight out of school), however to get an MBA you need work experience ... which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere Note: I am not saying that they have done "basic" work (as in: developing code, flipping burgers etc.). But they definitely are not launched into leadership position without ever having done anything.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere Even if so, that somewhere doesn't have to be the same industry you go with your first (usually not top-level) leadership position, and neither of those may be the industry in which you end up moving into a top-level leadership position.
- mercer 7y agoThe vast majority of managers I've had, whether product or program managers, had very little understanding or experience with the job of programming. In fact, i suspect more than half of them basically failed upwards. I can't be sure about this, because in many cases I could only see the piss-poor job they were currently doing, but I've experienced the incompetent junior-to-senior manager pipeline up close often enough that I wouldn't be surprised these senior managers were previously incompetent junior managers.
- dave_sid 7y agoYes a prime example is the NHS. Much management will have no experience attending to patients.
- namdnay 7y agoTo be fair on the NHS, there aren't enough Doctors or Nurses as it is.. it would be even worse if we started wasting their time managing budgets and KPIs
- bsenftner 7y agoWell, so far software has largely been tasked with non-life or death purposes, and as such the larger tech industry has been able to get away with a bit too much cowboy development, with structures where it is apparently needed least and overpaid rockstar developers burning themselves at a few too many companies. This is not sustainable, and can not continue once a largely automated society is attempted. At that point, software is no longer playing games, and will be pipelines of interconnected systems which must cooperate in a continual life or death scenario for everything to just work. The industry is going to have to get much more formal and transparent about the quality of the products we provide, or giant automated catastrophes will force regulations nobody will be happy about.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” In pretty much any industry where the “basic work” isn't white collar professional work, executives tend to have very little if any experience with the basic work. Where the basic work is white collar professional work, that's somewhat less common, but it is still not unheard of to have executives with general management experience but not experience with the basic work of the industry (EDIT: Or even industry-specific management: recruiting executives whose qualifying experience is in a similar executive role in a different industry isn't uncommon; a CxO chosen who was formerly a CxO with the same value of x in a different industry is common.)
- icedchai 7y agoI'd say this is pretty common outside of small business. Watch the show "Undercover Boss." You see the CEO's of major companies working the bottom rungs of their companies. They are often very, very out of touch, so far that they get "fired" by their own employees...
- qzw 7y agoI don't think the bullshitter problem is at all limited to the tech industry. In the financial industry there was Madoff, and not just him, but the surprising number of people who were ostensibly running their own funds who just put all the money into Madoff's hands and then took fees off the top. And having someone with a technical or engineering background at the top is no panacea against bullshit. IIRC, the top leadership of VW all started as engineers, but that didn't stop them from perpetrating the diesel fraud.
- rexpop 7y agoSo long as human labor is structured under Capital's impetus, we'll have such structures of idiocy because the VC is apodicticly talentless in the domain of his investment.
- mattrp 7y agoApodicticly... harsh bro!
- rakejake 7y ago>apodicticly .. first time I'm encountering this word. Really cool. From wiki, "Apodictic" or "apodeictic" (Ancient Greek: ἀποδεικτικός, "capable of demonstration") is an adjectival expression from Aristotelean logic that refers to propositions that are demonstrably, necessarily or self-evidently the case.
- PeterStuer 7y ago> “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most? Sorry for the blunt answer, but I really don't know how this can even be a question. The "I worked the assembly line and now I'm the CEO" is Hollywood fiction or outright lies in 99% of the cases.
- vonmoltke 7y ago> The "I worked the assembly line and now I'm the CEO" is Hollywood fiction or outright lies in 99% of the cases. Do you have a citation for 99% or are you... bullshitting?
- forgotmypw 7y agoActually, this is what my PhD thesis is about. See doi.13376942/8008135.2006/foo
- btilly 7y agoThat isn't a working link. Is it somewhere online?
- thecatspaw 7y agoconsidering that it spells leet 69 42 boobies 2006 foo, I doubt it
- CodiePetersen 7y agoWasn't the previous CEO of intel exactly that person.
- growlist 7y agome: 'it's a really bad idea to be developing new functionality on Flash in 2018' management: 'that's not a helpful attitude right now'
- mirekrusin 7y agoThat’s a bit shallow isn’t it? Did Elon fly rockets before creating space-x?
- airstrike 7y agoDidn't he at least finance it with a big portion of his own money, though? I'm more inclined to trust those than the Elizabeth Holmes Stanford dropout know nothing types
- saalweachter 7y agoI feel like there's a joke about getting high that could be made here.
- Macross8299 7y ago>“what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Not to belabour a point sibling comments have already made but I think it's the other way around, actually. Much more common to have a CEO in tech who has been in the trenches than in other industries. Compare the likelihood of a tech CEO having some software engineering/programming experience to the likelihood of an oil and gas executive having worked as a roustabout or a welder, or a healthcare industry exec having done rounds as a doctor or nurse.
- exelius 7y agoI would disagree; most tech CEOs are sales & marketing people at their core. Especially once you grow beyond the startup phase. Margins are fat enough in most tech verticals that operational efficiency often takes a back seat to driving the top-line. And once your growth starts to plateau, in comes a bean-counter CEO with a finance background.
- kthejoker2 7y agoDepends on what you mean by "basic work" - most of oil and gas leadership comes from the engineering and geoscience side of the house. Jeff Miller of Halliburton was a field manager. Mike Wirth at Chevron is a chemical engineer and Chevron lifer. Ben can Beurden of Shell is a chemical engineer and a Shell lifer. Clay Williams at NOV is a petroleum in engineer. Bob Dudley at BP is a chemical engineer and a BP lifer. Paal Kibsgaard at Schlumberger is a petroleum engineer. Ryan Lance at ConocoPhillips is a petroleum engineer. I could go on, you get the idea. These CEOs have definitely been in the trenches.