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An engineering degree does not a good CTO make. It really depends on the role and the organization and where Kratsios is a degree in Political Science is going

An engineering degree does not a good CTO make. It really depends on the role and the organization and where Kratsios is a degree in Political Science is going to be valuable. The role of CTO is not to be the most technical person in the room, but rather to lead the most technical people in the organization. This requires technical acumen, but more so requires good communication and leadership skills.

awinder 6y ago
“ The person he’s replacing, Michael Griffin, holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and served as a NASA administrator. Indeed, Kratsios will be less academically credentialled than most of the program-managers he oversees. So how did he get here?” It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. If I’m a director who was hired into the culture when that mattered, and now I’m several steps under a boss who flouts that, that’s a huge upsetting culture change. Now luckily, he’s only going to be in this job for a few months so the damage will be largely mitigated, but still. This is an idiots game and it doesn’t make us smarter for trying to nit it to being acceptable. It’s not.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  > It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. Apply this principle to elite-university admissions, big-tech hiring, or to developed-country citizenship and see how far you get with it.
- mmhsieh 6y ago
  Assuming Kratsios does not have experience already in doing so at Clarium: the problem will be -- when there is a dispute of opinion at the pentagon and two Ph.D.s with decades of experience come in with vast amounts of experience, but opposing and irreconcilable opinions -- how will Kratsios decide? If he does not know, he will need staffers; how will he judge the quality of the staff and their competence? Repeat this for the dozens of very big decisions he will be making, and the many dilemmas he will resolve.
  - washicalendar 6y ago
    This is the trump administration you’re talking about. The 33 year old will just pick whatever choice he thinks his boss, the idiot in the White House, will like. That’s it.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Believing he has responsibility or competence to decide would be his biggest mistake. It wouldn't matter if he actually did have credentials, it's not the role of an executive to decide technical disputes. Having independent knowledge and skills would enable him to discover when he is being lied to, and usually prevent the attempt. But he has been installed to direct budget to certain parties outside government, and can probably succeed at that. He might have been installed to commit the DoD to continue delivering budget to those parties long after he has been dismissed.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
enraged_camel 6y ago
>>An engineering degree does not a good CTO make. I view it as necessary, but not sufficient by itself.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  It’s not necessary for IC, why would it be necessary for management?
  - enraged_camel 6y ago
    Management is only one part of a CTO's job. An effective CTO needs to have strong technical acumen, so that they know what to prioritize, who to empower, and how to effectively communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders and partners. In addition, they need to have credibility in the eyes of the technical teams they lead. This usually comes in the form of past technical accomplishments, but can also be fulfilled via strong credentials, depending on the organization. In the case of Pentagon, which is a very formal organization, credentials will be absolutely necessary, which is why I think this guy is going to be... not very effective at his job.
mmhsieh 6y ago
I have seen great tech leaders without a STEM degree. But they have a deep understanding of technology people, technology development as a process, and technology as a business. I have seen would-be tech leaders who tried to take shortcuts. They end disastrously. Usually the problem boils down to judgment. They cannot tell who is producing the core value of the enterprise. They create unnecessary work. They add useless process. They have bizarre and unworkable ideas for products. They don't understand how to correctly price talent, and to retain it. They don't have the humility to know what they don't know. They overestimate how much they add to the enterprise. The good people end up jumping ship and they are left with a rump of pure mediocrity, if anything at all.
dccoolgai 6y ago
How many CFOs do you know that have a degree in Computer Science? Specialization is important in engineering for the same reason it is in finance (and not a lot of engineers are picked as CFO). Engineers _could_ be good at it, but it kind of shows a laughably shallow understanding of finance to think that would work as a rule rather than an exceedingly rare exception.
- quonn 6y ago
  This reminds me of a point Joel Spolsky made a long time ago. But I can‘t find it (Can anyone else remember?) It was about how in principle he can reason about markets, but it takes forever and „it all becomes very sad“. Or something like that. edit: found it https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recruiter/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recrui... „ These softball questions seem too easy, so when I first started asking them, I had to admit that I really expected everyone to sail right through them. What I discovered was that everybody solved the problem, but there was a lot of variation in how long it took them to solve. That reminded me of why I couldn’t trade bonds for a living. Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture. And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.“
jonmc12 6y ago
A possibly relevant example. Bill Taylor was a generalist, described by a more technical computer scientist colleague as a "concert pianist without fingers". Through his position at NASA, he had the vision to fund Doug Engelbart's mouse project around the age of 30, which directly enabled the mother of all demos in '68. https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.h...

awinder 6y ago

“ The person he’s replacing, Michael Griffin, holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and served as a NASA administrator. Indeed, Kratsios will be less academically credentialled than most of the program-managers he oversees. So how did he get here?” It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. If I’m a director who was hired into the culture when that mattered, and now I’m several steps under a boss who flouts that, that’s a huge upsetting culture change. Now luckily, he’s only going to be in this job for a few months so the damage will be largely mitigated, but still. This is an idiots game and it doesn’t make us smarter for trying to nit it to being acceptable. It’s not.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
> It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. Apply this principle to elite-university admissions, big-tech hiring, or to developed-country citizenship and see how far you get with it.
mmhsieh 6y ago
Assuming Kratsios does not have experience already in doing so at Clarium: the problem will be -- when there is a dispute of opinion at the pentagon and two Ph.D.s with decades of experience come in with vast amounts of experience, but opposing and irreconcilable opinions -- how will Kratsios decide? If he does not know, he will need staffers; how will he judge the quality of the staff and their competence? Repeat this for the dozens of very big decisions he will be making, and the many dilemmas he will resolve.
- washicalendar 6y ago
  This is the trump administration you’re talking about. The 33 year old will just pick whatever choice he thinks his boss, the idiot in the White House, will like. That’s it.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Believing he has responsibility or competence to decide would be his biggest mistake. It wouldn't matter if he actually did have credentials, it's not the role of an executive to decide technical disputes. Having independent knowledge and skills would enable him to discover when he is being lied to, and usually prevent the attempt. But he has been installed to direct budget to certain parties outside government, and can probably succeed at that. He might have been installed to commit the DoD to continue delivering budget to those parties long after he has been dismissed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

enraged_camel 6y ago

>>An engineering degree does not a good CTO make. I view it as necessary, but not sufficient by itself.

birdyrooster 6y ago
It’s not necessary for IC, why would it be necessary for management?
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  Management is only one part of a CTO's job. An effective CTO needs to have strong technical acumen, so that they know what to prioritize, who to empower, and how to effectively communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders and partners. In addition, they need to have credibility in the eyes of the technical teams they lead. This usually comes in the form of past technical accomplishments, but can also be fulfilled via strong credentials, depending on the organization. In the case of Pentagon, which is a very formal organization, credentials will be absolutely necessary, which is why I think this guy is going to be... not very effective at his job.

mmhsieh 6y ago

I have seen great tech leaders without a STEM degree. But they have a deep understanding of technology people, technology development as a process, and technology as a business. I have seen would-be tech leaders who tried to take shortcuts. They end disastrously. Usually the problem boils down to judgment. They cannot tell who is producing the core value of the enterprise. They create unnecessary work. They add useless process. They have bizarre and unworkable ideas for products. They don't understand how to correctly price talent, and to retain it. They don't have the humility to know what they don't know. They overestimate how much they add to the enterprise. The good people end up jumping ship and they are left with a rump of pure mediocrity, if anything at all.

dccoolgai 6y ago

How many CFOs do you know that have a degree in Computer Science? Specialization is important in engineering for the same reason it is in finance (and not a lot of engineers are picked as CFO). Engineers _could_ be good at it, but it kind of shows a laughably shallow understanding of finance to think that would work as a rule rather than an exceedingly rare exception.

quonn 6y ago
This reminds me of a point Joel Spolsky made a long time ago. But I can‘t find it (Can anyone else remember?) It was about how in principle he can reason about markets, but it takes forever and „it all becomes very sad“. Or something like that. edit: found it https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recruiter/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recrui... „ These softball questions seem too easy, so when I first started asking them, I had to admit that I really expected everyone to sail right through them. What I discovered was that everybody solved the problem, but there was a lot of variation in how long it took them to solve. That reminded me of why I couldn’t trade bonds for a living. Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture. And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.“

jonmc12 6y ago

A possibly relevant example. Bill Taylor was a generalist, described by a more technical computer scientist colleague as a "concert pianist without fingers". Through his position at NASA, he had the vision to fund Doug Engelbart's mouse project around the age of 30, which directly enabled the mother of all demos in '68. https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.h...