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Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

406 points by replyifuagree 6y ago

dehrmann 6y ago
Alternatively, experts in a field that's changing the world are more likely to start companies in that field.
- modeless 6y ago
  Yeah, also drawing conclusions from just the top ten companies is silly. But how do software engineers do managing non-software companies? Elon Musk is doing well. I guess you could count Amazon as retail instead of software. What other examples are there?
sebmellen 6y ago
> 1684: "Literate shopkeep'rs hath been found to bee mor' affluent"
bawolff 6y ago
Wow, talk about assuming correlation implies causation. I think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.
- GCA10 6y ago
  So true! Around 1980, chemical and petroleum engineers made the best CEOs, because oil prices were high and energy companies had the highest stock-market valuations. Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.
  - pydry 6y ago
    This might be true but I don't see why it is obvious, especially when it's not even commonly assumed that the best person to run a software company is a software engineer.
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      The article only considers founding CEOs. Tech founders are mostly software majors.
- GeneBond 6y ago
  I'm the author bawolff, and I completely agree that the success of software engineers as CEOs is correlation, not causation. The likely cause is that software engineers learn to discover value by running value experiments. Zuckerberg and Bezos are well known for their value experiments in production. I believe that the nature of pursuing new value, in effect, taught them this practice. And to the comment below, when it comes to oil, new value in the form of oil fields is also discovered. Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value, iterating in software is also prospecting for value. It's just that unlike oil, you can use software to prospect for all kinds of value very quickly.
  - danielmarkbruce 6y ago
    You might not be understanding his/her point...
  - bawolff 6y ago
    If you gave a list of non-software companies that had software engineers as their CEOs, i'd give this some credence, but as is this is kind of rediculous when you have a giant elephant in the room confounding factor that you're pretending doesn't exist. > Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value So is literally everything. Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease. Etc
  - efficax 6y ago
    The likely cause is that tech companies are the most recent space for capital innovation and profit, so have the hottest stocks right now
  - lgsilver 6y ago
    Okay, but this is a function of the medium not of the people. Crafting successful feedback loops has defined great leaders across industries for hundred(s) of years. A bent toward experimentation is not something that software engineers possess. It's a trait that great leaders build into their businesses.
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  When software is eating the world, this is exactly what we should expect to see.
- fchu 6y ago
  Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)
sebmellen 6y ago
Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0] - Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer. - Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me). That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
- anxrn 6y ago
  Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer. From the article [1] you linked, "He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering". Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing. [0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment. Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
    - anxrn 6y ago
      Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this. > *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs
anonytrary 6y ago
Intelligent people make the best CEOs. Software engineers are probably more intelligent, on average, than others. I think it might be better to look at IQ+EQ and see if there's a correlation there instead (although that data is probably not feasible to obtain).
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Software Engineers are probably more intelligent than people from other engineering disciplines, or people in general? If other engineering disciplines, it seems a bit pretentious.
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    People in general, of course.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    Engineering is bounded by the laws of physics. Software Engineering is bounded by the laws of magic. Engineering requires creativity to harness a material to perform useful work, within the material’s tolerances. Software Engineering requires creativity to create worlds that have no existence in reality, other than in the imagination of the software engineer himself. And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
    - astrange 6y ago
      I rather think software engineering is bounded by battery life and disk space.
      - elwell 6y ago
        Not to mention, the programmer's imagination is bounded by caloric intake and grey matter.
        6y ago
anaganisk 6y ago
Umm, if the product is software the domain expertise helps for that, but im not sure how companies like Shell or United Airlines benifit from a software CEO.
- selcuka 6y ago
  To be fair they listed the first 10 companies by market cap. It's not their fault neither Shell nor United Airlines made it to the top 10.
  - replyifuagree 6y ago
    Yeah, another software engineering CEO has put a real damper on Shell's stock price - Elon Musk with his EV revolution
- csomar 6y ago
  I don't know for Shell, but for airlines; maybe it's having a website/app that actually works.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  "Systems thinking" is useful to manage any organization. I don't know if it scales, but I can't count the number of times I've seen an engineer put in charge of a project just because they can understand a data flow diagram. Software is eating the world. IT costs and benefits are high. Getting IT right in many organizations is now more vital than ever before.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
The problem with using market cap for tech is that Wall Street and the financial industry in general factors in too much "hype" and imagined future earnings into their valuations. This should be obvious to anyone that sees headlines of X Company with unreliable revenue model now valued at $50 Billion. If instead you look at industries which don't have as much of this future hype, they are much more competitive. Fashion, for instance. LVMH has a market cap of $283 billion and Bernard Arnault briefly surpassed Bezos as the richest man in the world in 2019.
- replyifuagree 6y ago
  I agree. For example, look at companies by revenue, walmart is #1 and the no software engineer at the helm ever right? Of course now take a look at this macro trends chart comparing walmart to amazon https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenue&axis=single&comp=WMT:AMZN https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu... Now tell me your best guess on when when Amazon will pass Walmart to take Fortune 1.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    I don't doubt that Amazon will overtake Walmart, but I have an issue with calling someone the best CEO today based on a metric that is dependent on future projections.
    - replyifuagree 6y ago
      My conservative guess is three years. How about revenue growth rate? That's now right? Edit: one thing about revenue and profit is that there are businesses that operate off of graft that kind of throw a monkey wrench into those measures
      - ceilingcorner 6y ago
        I don't think you have understood my initial point. Please, read my first comment again. I'm not saying that Amazon won't overtake Walmart, but that tech companies benefit from future projections factored into their valuations, while other non-hyped businesses don't. If the argument is that "software engineers make the best CEOs", it seems more likely that companies in the software industry simply get higher valuations for the aforementioned reasons.
GeneBond 6y ago
Hi, I'm the original author. It's late for me, but if you have questions or comment for me, I will get back to you in the morning. The article has to do with this idea: "Software engineers deeply understand that you iterate your way to value through hundreds of failed attempts.” I by no means think software engineers are smarter or more virtuous. What I do think is that the high rates of fail from writing code teaches them to discover value iterative -- hence the Agile movement. Learning is pivoting moment by moment, and planning one value attempt or value experiment at a time IMO. It is the nature of value that shaped this behavior IMO, not some superior virtue -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76 https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
- fivecour 6y ago
  Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures? I also agree with others who said limiting analysis to the top 10 seems arbitrary, especially when you're covering mostly just the runaway outliers despite having the general overall claim of "why are software engineers better CEOs?" Does your analysis still hold when you expand your field of vision to the top 100, or top 1,000 companies?
  - Number157 6y ago
    The nitpicking on this forum is getting ridiculous.
    - danielmarkbruce 6y ago
      His criticism is quite valid. It's not nits he is picking. It's the overall argument, which is weak.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    I do feel like software is unique compared to most other fields due to the speed of iteration and possible impact. You can hack some crazy stuff together really quickly and it's possible for it to have an outsized impact.
ab111111111 6y ago
What this seems to show is that CEOs in a particular sector often have expertise in that sector. And that Tech is currently the most highly valued sector as measured by market capitalisation. To find evidence of Software Engineers being the best CEOs overall you'd really need to find examples of them running non-tech firms successfully or examples of non-Software Engineers running tech firms poorly.
- GeneBond 6y ago
  I'm the original author, and I certainly believe that there are all kinds of great CEOs. What I am saying in this article is that software engineering CEOs are breaking out due to the super-infrastructure that is software, and that guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are using software to speed the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68 https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I mean i think its clear what you're saying, the evidence you provide just doesn't support your conclusion all that well compared to the other possibilities.
  - JoshTko 6y ago
    This would be easy to prove if SE are disproportionately represented as CEOs in non software companies. My bet is this is not the case.
  - neonological 6y ago
    Software ceos correlate with software companies. Correlation does not equal causation.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Nonsense. Many of the 'top companies' at the moment are youngish software companies, many still run by their founders or early employees, which include lots of software engineers. If the current big thing was biotech the 'best' (ie most) CEOs would be chemists.
blackoil 6y ago
This is a lazy analysis. You can read that table as only men can be best CEOs or Americans are best CEOs.
jnwatson 6y ago
This is a natural consequence of a) software is eating the world and b) software companies tend to be founded by software engineers.
jbverschoor 6y ago
Well... if you're running a tech company, you need a CEO who understands tech. Why is that such a surprise?
- Geee 6y ago
  There's the idea that CEO should be a 'business person', and technical people are cogs in the machine.
  - langitbiru 6y ago
    This. In my country, almost all of software engineers are advised to become CTO not CEO if they want to become founders.
- Number157 6y ago
  A vast majority of companies (most of them not very successful) don't do this.
d33d33 6y ago
As someone working in it-consulting for some big companies in germany, i can't confirm. It's usually the other way around - if a company grows too fast, they're tempted to make some smart engineer a manager. usually they will have a hard time coming from a very detailed world into the high level business world. besides being good problem-analysts, they are confronted with politics, strategy, leadership, ... - so all the skills that really matter at ceo level. That being said, i can't agree with the statement that sw engineers make the best CEOs. But i tend to agree that a basic knowledge of IT/Software/Hardware is a must.
harha 6y ago
Seems to just say that software is currently a better industry by market cap than others.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zubairov 6y ago
Good example of survivorship bias :)
PeterStuer 6y ago
The best managers are those that could do the job they manage. That is a recursive algorithm.
gorkempacaci 6y ago
Dubious. Software and computing itself as an industry has been thriving in the last decades, so it is natural the founders come from the same field.
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
Primarily because the companies listed succeeded in capitalizing on Software Eating the World (Thiel). Software companies grew the way they did because, for a while, there was little regulatory capture, with tech doing what tech wanted, at least with the unicorns. Thiel, PG have commented on this. There was a recent article on HN from O'Reilly - the new wave of breakthroughs anticipated, in biotech, might not have room for engineer CEOs, nor the unicorn growth of software-based start-ups.
- etripe 6y ago
  Just a small nitpick: what you probably mean is there was little regulation. Regulatory capture is what occurs after regulation has been established, is seen as a hindrance and companies start currying favour by greasing the wheels. In a word, captured regulatory agencies are beholden to the industry. See also: Ajit Pai in the FCC, SOPA, Boeing and the FAA...
  - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
    I could have worded better, thanks.
dalbasal 6y ago
...because these companies are engineering companies? 7/10 of the biggest companies are software companies. 6/7 of the software companies were founded by engineers. Ma is an outlier. Any of these other points might be true, but there's no empirical reason to expect that that they predict "success." The simpler explanation is that software company founders tend to be engineers. Financial companies tend to be run by financiers, etc. Conclusions like "discovery of solutions via techniques like continuous A/B testing" may be true, but they're not required to explain why engineer founded companies dominate the top 10.
zheng_qm 6y ago
Internet Boom (Confounder) / \ / \ / \ Software Engineers ----> Successful CEOs
- mempko 6y ago
  Thank you for using a causal diagram. A tool so few understand but so many can benefit from. Cuts to the heart of the argument and eliminates all the bullshit.
- elwell 6y ago
  Note that it's the 'confounder' not an internet boom cofounder, though that's also true.
0xfaded 6y ago
One of the brilliant things about start-ups is that it allows you to step directly into the CEO shoes, and I'm amazed by and extremely grateful for the willingness of investors to allow first time founders to learn on the fly. There is a hurdle though, that being a CEO of a startup is a full time job. A consequence is that if you happen to be a strong engineer with relevant skills in a cash strapped environment, you will come under strong pressure to be an engineer and perform poorly as a CEO unless you can raise the funds to hire a top-tier engineer. Now I get to insert yet another gripe against Europe and its horrible environment for fundraising. I believe that the lack of technical CEOs is likely due to the lack of resources (both at startups and large companies) to develop them.
infinity0 6y ago
From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :) I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.
- diegoperini 6y ago
  > People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.
  - nixass 6y ago
    Not all MBAs are pursuing personal money, but when there's high visibility debacle (Intel, Boeing) there are always MBAs and accountant involved, not engineers. It's against engineer's logic to do moves/products like that.
grahamlee 6y ago
This article needs an image of the plane with red dots where all the bullet holes were. That, or to explain how great software engineer CEOs include Jonathan Schwartz, Stephen Elop, and all those one-person companies that are still waiting for the coffee shops in Palo Alto to reopen so they can pick up their “business address” mail.
draklor40 6y ago
The classic selection bias. If the list of "top" companies is mostly software companies (which is FAANG++ at the moment), then how is it uncommon for a software engg. to lead the company ?
- missedthecue 6y ago
  My thought as well. The last two CEOs of ExxonMobil were engineers, the last CEO of Boeing was an engineer, and the CEO of General Motors is an engineer. Of course, all in mechanical or electrical engineering rather than software. Not sure why it's so insightful that people who understand the business also run the business.
mola 6y ago
Because software is the highest growing industry?
kjgkjhfkjf 6y ago
Describing Larry, Sergey, and Zuck as software engineers is a bit generous, as I'm sure they'd be the first to admit :)
- danielmarkbruce 6y ago
  +1
isamuel 6y ago
All of the people on this list are "software engineers" in the sense that they have some rudimentary education in the field. Almost none of them could get a job as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified. And I'm not looking down my nose at anyone: I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. But if I started a really valuable company tomorrow (maybe I should), I would code as a software engineer on this list. I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not?
- bjarneh 6y ago
  > and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. You'd be surprised...
- mrwoggle 6y ago
  > and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. If you have already a CS degree and you spend a couple months refreshing your memory, you would be amazed what codebases you can touch.
  - mettamage 6y ago
    They won't let you touch it. I've sent out more than 100 resumes and got in at only two despite having a bachelor + master in CS. The one company that I got in severely underpaid me. This is in NL and I might be an outlier, but I'm beginning to see a problem. I also applied (in secret) when I got the job, my odds didn't improve.
    - vntok 6y ago
      Most probably there's something else very wrong with your resume. The job being in high demand, your foot-in-the-door rate should be much higher.
7ewis 6y ago
It does make sense... if you want to build a software company, already having SE skills would be very useful. Exactly the same way a salesman would be better at starting a sales company, etc.
AzzieElbab 6y ago
To defeat an engineer one must become an engineer
g051051 6y ago
According to the last company I worked at, software engineers can do everyone else's jobs when things get behind. PO busy? Work with the customer to get requirements, then write stories and tickets. QA running behind? Developers can do the testing. Need to hire more people and the manager doesn't have time? Have the devs do all the interviews. Need more ops staff? Call it DevOps and put the devs on call. So clearly software engineers are the smartest people in any organization. No wonder they become CEOs!
rvba 6y ago
Why are so many CEOs of medical companies are doctors of medicine? Because domain knowledge is needed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Grustaf 6y ago
Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. I'm also not sure many of the others qualify either, were Sergey and Larry "good CEOs"? As others have noted, the correlation between developer CEOs and success is that many of the most successful companies today are software companies. Is there even a single large non-tech company with a developer as CEO? If anything I would assume developers are substantially worse than average as CEOs, from lacking interpersonal skills to exaggerated focus on details.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  change good to successful
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    OK sure, I guess they do belong.
- danjac 6y ago
  > Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. Wozniak is many great things, but sadly yes he probably would have been: https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/steve-wozniak-us-fest/ https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/steve-wozniak-us-fest/
de6u99er 6y ago
While none of them should conduct software engineering tasks and better leave that work to professionals, it certainly is good to understand how the process works, and how to value the struggles of plugging things together to create something out of nothing. That being said, many companies have hierarchies of clueless managers between the CEO and the engineering team. Having someone at the helm who understands the good-fast-cheap triangle [1] in tech driven companies is from my point of view a good thing. This doesn't imply that every software engineer can be a CEO. It requires a lot of other (soft) skills to do this job. [1] https://www.explanimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/goodfastcheap.jpeg https://www.explanimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/go...
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
My take: software is a form of literacy. In a world of literacy, you are a fool to hire an illiterate person as a CEO. So we start to see the shakeout. Look, in early Medieval Europe, Charlemagne could only write his name, and was functionlly illiterate for much of his life. But every Holy Roman Emperor afterwards was a as literate as you or I. We are at that hand over stage now - every CEO in the previous generation could get away with being Charlegmane. Not any more
aborsy 6y ago
They claim to be. I doubt most of them would get an interview. There is a lot of charlatanism. If you ask Mr. Musk what’s your speciality, he would say I am a physicist.
k__ 6y ago
I saw what engineers were hired by people who didn't have the slightest idea about tech. They got fooled quite often. Not on purpose, the engs they hired didn't know any better. This was also true for technical people who would hire outside their domain. Hardware people hiring web devs were also fooled often.
adim86 6y ago
There is a bias in this article and that is the context of time. Over time there will be less and less software engineers at the top of this list as software engineering becomes more common field of study. If you look at the people listed, they were people who set up these companies not to make money. I am not saying they are not interested in money, but if you were someone interested in mainly in making money within a reasonable time frame and you were intelligent at the times Google, FB and others were invented, building these companies would have not been the easiest way to make money at those times (dot com bubble etc). These people started these companies due to an obsession with the problem, the need to make a change etc. These companies have grown to be insane empires, not because it has been software engineers running them, but software engineering is a new field that greatly impacts the world at this time and they are the people that solved the harder mainstream problems at the time. If this was in the industrial age, we would see more blacksmiths and manufacturers and railroad builders on the list, than farmers or accountants or whatever. It is a mixture of time, depth of problem and an obsession to solve it. Not that there is something intrinsically special about software engineers
chadash 6y ago
This question might as well be, why are so many software engineers founders of software companies? Well, duh. What would be notable is if there were many software engineers leading non-software companies. That does not seem to be the case.
harpiaharpyja 6y ago
The first thing that comes to mind is that correlation is not causation. The author says nothing to address that. In fact, not far into the article they effectively state they're just going to assume that his hypothesis is correct and then proceeds to hunt for reasons why. This raises all kinds of red flags for me. I'm sure you don't have to look far for a common cause explanation of the hypothesis.
mathattack 6y ago
The answer seems too obvious to state. Companies with SW at the core need someone who knows what’s feasible. Same reason why Berkshire Hathaway (on their list) has a Financier at the core - they’re in the Capital allocation business. It’s why most law firms are run by a lawyer. And why most research universities presidents have a PhD.
tgtweak 6y ago
I would imagine that in proportion to the amount of jobs in software engineering, the representation at CEO level is disproportionately small compared to other fields.
amazingfall 6y ago
The arrogance of engineers who seem to think they're better than everyone else will be it's downfall.
samlosodesign 6y ago
It’s because there is clearly an overvaluation problem in tech right now. ‘Successful’ depends on the ways you are measuring success.
TeeWEE 6y ago
Stopped reading after seeing this: "Amazon.com $1,432B Yes, Bezos" Bezos is not a programmer.
- dnh44 6y ago
  From his Wikipedia entry: >In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
nottorp 6y ago
highly publicized succesful CEOs? In domains that are either all IT or where IT is a key part? :)
anyonecancode 6y ago
Another version of the question -- why are so many successful companies centered on software? Asked that way, CEOs with developer or software engineering experience isn't so surprising, but leads to the more interesting questions around software's prominent role in our current economy. I suspect that within 25 years that mix will change as being a "software company" will become less of a meaningful distinction (and to some degree already is -- what is a "tech" company these days?). Every company will be a "software company" and won't lean as heavily on its leadership being having a specific background in technology. ETA - ah, looking at comments I see others have already made the same point.
Tycho 6y ago
I think software engineering gives people visceral feedback on principles/strategies that transfer well to other domains, but aren't as obvious to people in other domains. For instance: loose coupling, modularity, type checking, unit testing, avoiding side-effects, information hiding, readability, continuous integration, version control, service oriented architecture, reusability, many-eyes, (a)synchronicity, buffering, caching, portability, redundancy, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, avoiding premature optimization, rapid iteration, relational and object modeling, infosec, complexity analysis, scalability, technical debt. And, of course, any modern organization is totally dependent on software in some way, so understanding this stuff is always going to be helpful for a CEO when making related hiring decisions and signing contracts.
IncRnd 6y ago
The title and what are shown in the article do not match. The headline shows, "...CEOs software engineer...," yet the article shows, "...founding CEOs software engineer..." This is a huge difference. Half of the Founding CEOs shown are not actual software engineers but other types of engineers. In the vein of the article, "Why do article writers make basic off-by-one errors, engage in clickbait, and treat logical fallacies as the truth?"
meiraleal 6y ago
The same way many engineers are successful CEOs: software engineers are successful in general because it is a profession that CAN make you smarter every day. It is too easy to see the value of compound interest.
analog31 6y ago
I think the most striking thing to notice in that list is that the top 7 or so businesses are closely related to software. The article alludes to the fact that software is a big industry. And those businesses all seem to share a similarity, which is that they chose as their CEO the person who happened to have founded the business, or who owns / owned it outright. These are also people who have figured out how to make software development work for them, not kill them. That's huge. An interesting study would be to see how people with software engineering background (by some agreed upon definition) fare as CEO's of companies that they didn't start or own. Granted, that might take more time and study.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
In the past, accounting was the most important aspect of running a business. Now that is secondary to IT.
cymon 6y ago
Has anybody else noticed that list is dominated by American companies? Should we be asking why are are American software engineer led companies dominating the list?
corpMaverick 6y ago
Anecdotal. Back in the day, I worked for a large distribution company where the CEO, CCO, CFO, and COO came from IT. When you looked through the code you could still see their commits. They had a unique perspective because they had in their minds giant maps of how everything connected behind scenes. Purchasing, orders, payments, receivables, inventory, etc. For example. The people in purchasing only knew how purchasing worked but they didn't understand how the system connected with finance or operations. But the C* executives knew, and understood what was possible and what difficult. They were very effective. It was a pleasure working with them. To this day I think it was a great model.
icedchai 6y ago
I used to point this out to a founder of a former company. He'd reject out ideas and suggestions, then make jokes like "there's a reason engineers aren't CEOs!" I had to remind him of all the successful companies run by engineers. The best tech startups I've worked for had technical CEOs or co-founders with engineering backgrounds ("best" meaning good to work for and most successful.) Worst were guys who thought they were going to somehow be the next Bill Gates just because he didn't graduate college, either.
Barrin92 6y ago
I'm not sure I follow the methodology here. Apple isn't worth 2 trillion because of Wozniak, who hasn't been at the company in decades. It's worth that much because it's a technology company, and technology is profitable, and almost tautologically founders of technology companies are technologists. However many if not all of these companies have gained most of their market value under the management of fairly ordinary business-type CEOs and management, who at best have some expertise in a technical field.
jcfrei 6y ago
There are so many things wrong with just using market cap as a proxy for success. A better measure (if you want to use equity prices) would be change in share price during the tenure of the CEO relative to their industry peer group. I think that's also the basis for most CEO compensations. Market caps change based on discount rates, time in the economic cycle, financial structure of the company (debt vs equity), share buyback programs, equity offerings, etc, etc.
drtournier 6y ago
I wonder how much classic survival bias plays a role in this. Since most startups fail and the failure is usually due to lack of cashflow, startups that has the founder as a software engineer can have more bootstrap resources. Which potentially increases the chance of these companies to cross the chasm.
alistairSH 6y ago
What a ridiculous question. The article itself explains it: software is swallowing the world. 7 of the top 10 companies by market cap are software companies (or closely related). Do bankers tend to lead banking companies? A cursory glance at the top-5 banks in the US indicates that to be the case. They were largely founded by, and are currently run by, bankers.
- hinkley 6y ago
  "Kid, never write software for a hardware company." The reason I was given for this advice is that they don't understand how iterations work in software, and so they can grossly misunderstand your level of doneness. This is first a big headache and then a source of post-release problems because you end up rushing things out. Getting more software-savvy people into management in more industries would definitely help with that.
r0s 6y ago
They touch on it, but I think one crucial benefit is the ability to see the scope of software work in general, which in turn drives and defines modern business. Unrealistic scope expectations are a huge problem for business people without the technical background to intuit pitfalls.
crazygringo 6y ago
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous article. If you actually want to show that software engineers wind up being more successful CEO's then you can't look at the top 10 companies, there is virtually zero statistical significance here whatsoever. Instead, take a look at the Fortune 500 at a minimum (or better yet, all publicly traded companies). And then you need to rigorously define what makes a CEO "better" -- which isn't market cap. Indeed, it could trivially be the case that software engineers fail 10x as often as other founders, but that they found 100x more companies so they have more absolute successes. The only thing that the top-10 shows is that there are a lot of tech companies in the top 10, and that tech companies tend to be founded by software engineers, while non-tech companies aren't. Which is... about as surprising as saying that mega-financial companies tend to be founded by bankers, or that restaurants tend to be founded by chefs.
didibus 6y ago
I'm not sure why it's so surprising that tech companies are more successful when the CEO is tech aware. Understanding the challenges of software engineering and development and knowing the range of feasibilities for what software can and cannot solve with an intuition into the effort and cost of each is for sure an advantage as a CEO when running a software driven company. I'd say if you don't have that perspective and are CEO of a software driven company, I'd make sure that you have a very close group of constant SE advisers to help you out.
xiaosun 6y ago
I know I'm being repetitive of points already made by prior posters, but the logical fallacy of this article is so egregious that I can't help but post it again. The opening paragraph of this article: "From the onset, we have chosen to use one of Wall Street's measures of a better CEO – namely, market cap. In other words, by this measure, CEOs that create the most value are the best CEOs. Sure, there are other measures perhaps more virtuous; but market capital is well-known, generally reliable, and historically trended. So, let’s just roll with it as our measure of “better CEOs” as we have lots to discuss. An objective review of the data leads to the conclusion: top companies are increasingly founded and managed by software engineers." The first 100 words in this paragraph and the "objective conclusion" drawn is all you need to read to know the remaining 7000+ words are completely logically flawed. It's like making the assertion "the best restaurants in the world serve the most meals, so an objective review of the data leads to the conclusion that fast food restaurants have the best chefs."
rajacombinator 6y ago
TLDR article but seems it, and most of the top level comments here surprisingly miss the obvious answer. Software engineers practice systematic logical thinking on a daily basis. Most other fields do not, and if you’ve worked for people from those fields, you’ve certainly seen the lack of structured thinking. Combine structured logical thinking about systems and processes with a few of the other skills needed to succeed as a founder and you can go very far.
ffggvv 6y ago
maybe because its a lot easier to code a side project and build it from there then to have to hire someone just to build your MVP? In addition, you're likely to know other engineers you can recruit.

406 points by replyifuagree 6y ago

dehrmann 6y ago

Alternatively, experts in a field that's changing the world are more likely to start companies in that field.

modeless 6y ago
Yeah, also drawing conclusions from just the top ten companies is silly. But how do software engineers do managing non-software companies? Elon Musk is doing well. I guess you could count Amazon as retail instead of software. What other examples are there?

sebmellen 6y ago

> 1684: "Literate shopkeep'rs hath been found to bee mor' affluent"

bawolff 6y ago

Wow, talk about assuming correlation implies causation. I think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.

GCA10 6y ago
So true! Around 1980, chemical and petroleum engineers made the best CEOs, because oil prices were high and energy companies had the highest stock-market valuations. Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.
- pydry 6y ago
  This might be true but I don't see why it is obvious, especially when it's not even commonly assumed that the best person to run a software company is a software engineer.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    The article only considers founding CEOs. Tech founders are mostly software majors.
GeneBond 6y ago
I'm the author bawolff, and I completely agree that the success of software engineers as CEOs is correlation, not causation. The likely cause is that software engineers learn to discover value by running value experiments. Zuckerberg and Bezos are well known for their value experiments in production. I believe that the nature of pursuing new value, in effect, taught them this practice. And to the comment below, when it comes to oil, new value in the form of oil fields is also discovered. Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value, iterating in software is also prospecting for value. It's just that unlike oil, you can use software to prospect for all kinds of value very quickly.
- danielmarkbruce 6y ago
  You might not be understanding his/her point...
- bawolff 6y ago
  If you gave a list of non-software companies that had software engineers as their CEOs, i'd give this some credence, but as is this is kind of rediculous when you have a giant elephant in the room confounding factor that you're pretending doesn't exist. > Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value So is literally everything. Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease. Etc
- efficax 6y ago
  The likely cause is that tech companies are the most recent space for capital innovation and profit, so have the hottest stocks right now
- lgsilver 6y ago
  Okay, but this is a function of the medium not of the people. Crafting successful feedback loops has defined great leaders across industries for hundred(s) of years. A bent toward experimentation is not something that software engineers possess. It's a trait that great leaders build into their businesses.
sixQuarks 6y ago
When software is eating the world, this is exactly what we should expect to see.
fchu 6y ago
Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)

sebmellen 6y ago

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0] - Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer. - Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me). That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

anxrn 6y ago
Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer. From the article [1] you linked, "He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering". Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing. [0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment. Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
  - anxrn 6y ago
    Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this. > *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs

anonytrary 6y ago

Intelligent people make the best CEOs. Software engineers are probably more intelligent, on average, than others. I think it might be better to look at IQ+EQ and see if there's a correlation there instead (although that data is probably not feasible to obtain).

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Software Engineers are probably more intelligent than people from other engineering disciplines, or people in general? If other engineering disciplines, it seems a bit pretentious.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  People in general, of course.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Engineering is bounded by the laws of physics. Software Engineering is bounded by the laws of magic. Engineering requires creativity to harness a material to perform useful work, within the material’s tolerances. Software Engineering requires creativity to create worlds that have no existence in reality, other than in the imagination of the software engineer himself. And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
  - astrange 6y ago
    I rather think software engineering is bounded by battery life and disk space.
    - elwell 6y ago
      Not to mention, the programmer's imagination is bounded by caloric intake and grey matter.
      - 6y ago

anaganisk 6y ago

Umm, if the product is software the domain expertise helps for that, but im not sure how companies like Shell or United Airlines benifit from a software CEO.

selcuka 6y ago
To be fair they listed the first 10 companies by market cap. It's not their fault neither Shell nor United Airlines made it to the top 10.
- replyifuagree 6y ago
  Yeah, another software engineering CEO has put a real damper on Shell's stock price - Elon Musk with his EV revolution
csomar 6y ago
I don't know for Shell, but for airlines; maybe it's having a website/app that actually works.
jnwatson 6y ago
"Systems thinking" is useful to manage any organization. I don't know if it scales, but I can't count the number of times I've seen an engineer put in charge of a project just because they can understand a data flow diagram. Software is eating the world. IT costs and benefits are high. Getting IT right in many organizations is now more vital than ever before.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

The problem with using market cap for tech is that Wall Street and the financial industry in general factors in too much "hype" and imagined future earnings into their valuations. This should be obvious to anyone that sees headlines of X Company with unreliable revenue model now valued at $50 Billion. If instead you look at industries which don't have as much of this future hype, they are much more competitive. Fashion, for instance. LVMH has a market cap of $283 billion and Bernard Arnault briefly surpassed Bezos as the richest man in the world in 2019.

replyifuagree 6y ago
I agree. For example, look at companies by revenue, walmart is #1 and the no software engineer at the helm ever right? Of course now take a look at this macro trends chart comparing walmart to amazon https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenue&axis=single&comp=WMT:AMZN https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu... Now tell me your best guess on when when Amazon will pass Walmart to take Fortune 1.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I don't doubt that Amazon will overtake Walmart, but I have an issue with calling someone the best CEO today based on a metric that is dependent on future projections.
  - replyifuagree 6y ago
    My conservative guess is three years. How about revenue growth rate? That's now right? Edit: one thing about revenue and profit is that there are businesses that operate off of graft that kind of throw a monkey wrench into those measures
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      I don't think you have understood my initial point. Please, read my first comment again. I'm not saying that Amazon won't overtake Walmart, but that tech companies benefit from future projections factored into their valuations, while other non-hyped businesses don't. If the argument is that "software engineers make the best CEOs", it seems more likely that companies in the software industry simply get higher valuations for the aforementioned reasons.

GeneBond 6y ago

Hi, I'm the original author. It's late for me, but if you have questions or comment for me, I will get back to you in the morning. The article has to do with this idea: "Software engineers deeply understand that you iterate your way to value through hundreds of failed attempts.” I by no means think software engineers are smarter or more virtuous. What I do think is that the high rates of fail from writing code teaches them to discover value iterative -- hence the Agile movement. Learning is pivoting moment by moment, and planning one value attempt or value experiment at a time IMO. It is the nature of value that shaped this behavior IMO, not some superior virtue -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76 https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76

fivecour 6y ago
Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures? I also agree with others who said limiting analysis to the top 10 seems arbitrary, especially when you're covering mostly just the runaway outliers despite having the general overall claim of "why are software engineers better CEOs?" Does your analysis still hold when you expand your field of vision to the top 100, or top 1,000 companies?
- Number157 6y ago
  The nitpicking on this forum is getting ridiculous.
  - danielmarkbruce 6y ago
    His criticism is quite valid. It's not nits he is picking. It's the overall argument, which is weak.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  I do feel like software is unique compared to most other fields due to the speed of iteration and possible impact. You can hack some crazy stuff together really quickly and it's possible for it to have an outsized impact.

ab111111111 6y ago

What this seems to show is that CEOs in a particular sector often have expertise in that sector. And that Tech is currently the most highly valued sector as measured by market capitalisation. To find evidence of Software Engineers being the best CEOs overall you'd really need to find examples of them running non-tech firms successfully or examples of non-Software Engineers running tech firms poorly.

GeneBond 6y ago
I'm the original author, and I certainly believe that there are all kinds of great CEOs. What I am saying in this article is that software engineering CEOs are breaking out due to the super-infrastructure that is software, and that guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are using software to speed the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68 https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68
- bawolff 6y ago
  I mean i think its clear what you're saying, the evidence you provide just doesn't support your conclusion all that well compared to the other possibilities.
- JoshTko 6y ago
  This would be easy to prove if SE are disproportionately represented as CEOs in non software companies. My bet is this is not the case.
- neonological 6y ago
  Software ceos correlate with software companies. Correlation does not equal causation.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Nonsense. Many of the 'top companies' at the moment are youngish software companies, many still run by their founders or early employees, which include lots of software engineers. If the current big thing was biotech the 'best' (ie most) CEOs would be chemists.

blackoil 6y ago

This is a lazy analysis. You can read that table as only men can be best CEOs or Americans are best CEOs.

jnwatson 6y ago

This is a natural consequence of a) software is eating the world and b) software companies tend to be founded by software engineers.

jbverschoor 6y ago

Well... if you're running a tech company, you need a CEO who understands tech. Why is that such a surprise?

Geee 6y ago
There's the idea that CEO should be a 'business person', and technical people are cogs in the machine.
- langitbiru 6y ago
  This. In my country, almost all of software engineers are advised to become CTO not CEO if they want to become founders.
Number157 6y ago
A vast majority of companies (most of them not very successful) don't do this.

d33d33 6y ago

As someone working in it-consulting for some big companies in germany, i can't confirm. It's usually the other way around - if a company grows too fast, they're tempted to make some smart engineer a manager. usually they will have a hard time coming from a very detailed world into the high level business world. besides being good problem-analysts, they are confronted with politics, strategy, leadership, ... - so all the skills that really matter at ceo level. That being said, i can't agree with the statement that sw engineers make the best CEOs. But i tend to agree that a basic knowledge of IT/Software/Hardware is a must.

harha 6y ago

Seems to just say that software is currently a better industry by market cap than others.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zubairov 6y ago

Good example of survivorship bias :)

PeterStuer 6y ago

The best managers are those that could do the job they manage. That is a recursive algorithm.

gorkempacaci 6y ago

Dubious. Software and computing itself as an industry has been thriving in the last decades, so it is natural the founders come from the same field.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

Primarily because the companies listed succeeded in capitalizing on Software Eating the World (Thiel). Software companies grew the way they did because, for a while, there was little regulatory capture, with tech doing what tech wanted, at least with the unicorns. Thiel, PG have commented on this. There was a recent article on HN from O'Reilly - the new wave of breakthroughs anticipated, in biotech, might not have room for engineer CEOs, nor the unicorn growth of software-based start-ups.

etripe 6y ago
Just a small nitpick: what you probably mean is there was little regulation. Regulatory capture is what occurs after regulation has been established, is seen as a hindrance and companies start currying favour by greasing the wheels. In a word, captured regulatory agencies are beholden to the industry. See also: Ajit Pai in the FCC, SOPA, Boeing and the FAA...
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  I could have worded better, thanks.

dalbasal 6y ago

...because these companies are engineering companies? 7/10 of the biggest companies are software companies. 6/7 of the software companies were founded by engineers. Ma is an outlier. Any of these other points might be true, but there's no empirical reason to expect that that they predict "success." The simpler explanation is that software company founders tend to be engineers. Financial companies tend to be run by financiers, etc. Conclusions like "discovery of solutions via techniques like continuous A/B testing" may be true, but they're not required to explain why engineer founded companies dominate the top 10.

zheng_qm 6y ago

Internet Boom (Confounder) / \ / \ / \ Software Engineers ----> Successful CEOs

mempko 6y ago
Thank you for using a causal diagram. A tool so few understand but so many can benefit from. Cuts to the heart of the argument and eliminates all the bullshit.
elwell 6y ago
Note that it's the 'confounder' not an internet boom cofounder, though that's also true.

0xfaded 6y ago

One of the brilliant things about start-ups is that it allows you to step directly into the CEO shoes, and I'm amazed by and extremely grateful for the willingness of investors to allow first time founders to learn on the fly. There is a hurdle though, that being a CEO of a startup is a full time job. A consequence is that if you happen to be a strong engineer with relevant skills in a cash strapped environment, you will come under strong pressure to be an engineer and perform poorly as a CEO unless you can raise the funds to hire a top-tier engineer. Now I get to insert yet another gripe against Europe and its horrible environment for fundraising. I believe that the lack of technical CEOs is likely due to the lack of resources (both at startups and large companies) to develop them.

infinity0 6y ago

From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :) I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.

diegoperini 6y ago
> People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.
- nixass 6y ago
  Not all MBAs are pursuing personal money, but when there's high visibility debacle (Intel, Boeing) there are always MBAs and accountant involved, not engineers. It's against engineer's logic to do moves/products like that.

grahamlee 6y ago

This article needs an image of the plane with red dots where all the bullet holes were. That, or to explain how great software engineer CEOs include Jonathan Schwartz, Stephen Elop, and all those one-person companies that are still waiting for the coffee shops in Palo Alto to reopen so they can pick up their “business address” mail.

draklor40 6y ago

The classic selection bias. If the list of "top" companies is mostly software companies (which is FAANG++ at the moment), then how is it uncommon for a software engg. to lead the company ?

missedthecue 6y ago
My thought as well. The last two CEOs of ExxonMobil were engineers, the last CEO of Boeing was an engineer, and the CEO of General Motors is an engineer. Of course, all in mechanical or electrical engineering rather than software. Not sure why it's so insightful that people who understand the business also run the business.

mola 6y ago

Because software is the highest growing industry?

kjgkjhfkjf 6y ago

Describing Larry, Sergey, and Zuck as software engineers is a bit generous, as I'm sure they'd be the first to admit :)

danielmarkbruce 6y ago
+1

isamuel 6y ago

All of the people on this list are "software engineers" in the sense that they have some rudimentary education in the field. Almost none of them could get a job as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified. And I'm not looking down my nose at anyone: I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. But if I started a really valuable company tomorrow (maybe I should), I would code as a software engineer on this list. I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not?

bjarneh 6y ago
> and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. You'd be surprised...
mrwoggle 6y ago
> and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. If you have already a CS degree and you spend a couple months refreshing your memory, you would be amazed what codebases you can touch.
- mettamage 6y ago
  They won't let you touch it. I've sent out more than 100 resumes and got in at only two despite having a bachelor + master in CS. The one company that I got in severely underpaid me. This is in NL and I might be an outlier, but I'm beginning to see a problem. I also applied (in secret) when I got the job, my odds didn't improve.
  - vntok 6y ago
    Most probably there's something else very wrong with your resume. The job being in high demand, your foot-in-the-door rate should be much higher.

7ewis 6y ago

It does make sense... if you want to build a software company, already having SE skills would be very useful. Exactly the same way a salesman would be better at starting a sales company, etc.

AzzieElbab 6y ago

To defeat an engineer one must become an engineer

g051051 6y ago

According to the last company I worked at, software engineers can do everyone else's jobs when things get behind. PO busy? Work with the customer to get requirements, then write stories and tickets. QA running behind? Developers can do the testing. Need to hire more people and the manager doesn't have time? Have the devs do all the interviews. Need more ops staff? Call it DevOps and put the devs on call. So clearly software engineers are the smartest people in any organization. No wonder they become CEOs!

rvba 6y ago

Why are so many CEOs of medical companies are doctors of medicine? Because domain knowledge is needed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Grustaf 6y ago

Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. I'm also not sure many of the others qualify either, were Sergey and Larry "good CEOs"? As others have noted, the correlation between developer CEOs and success is that many of the most successful companies today are software companies. Is there even a single large non-tech company with a developer as CEO? If anything I would assume developers are substantially worse than average as CEOs, from lacking interpersonal skills to exaggerated focus on details.

JacobSuperslav 6y ago
change good to successful
- Grustaf 6y ago
  OK sure, I guess they do belong.
danjac 6y ago
> Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. Wozniak is many great things, but sadly yes he probably would have been: https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/steve-wozniak-us-fest/ https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/steve-wozniak-us-fest/

de6u99er 6y ago

While none of them should conduct software engineering tasks and better leave that work to professionals, it certainly is good to understand how the process works, and how to value the struggles of plugging things together to create something out of nothing. That being said, many companies have hierarchies of clueless managers between the CEO and the engineering team. Having someone at the helm who understands the good-fast-cheap triangle [1] in tech driven companies is from my point of view a good thing. This doesn't imply that every software engineer can be a CEO. It requires a lot of other (soft) skills to do this job. [1] https://www.explanimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/goodfastcheap.jpeg https://www.explanimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/go...

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

My take: software is a form of literacy. In a world of literacy, you are a fool to hire an illiterate person as a CEO. So we start to see the shakeout. Look, in early Medieval Europe, Charlemagne could only write his name, and was functionlly illiterate for much of his life. But every Holy Roman Emperor afterwards was a as literate as you or I. We are at that hand over stage now - every CEO in the previous generation could get away with being Charlegmane. Not any more

aborsy 6y ago

They claim to be. I doubt most of them would get an interview. There is a lot of charlatanism. If you ask Mr. Musk what’s your speciality, he would say I am a physicist.

k__ 6y ago

I saw what engineers were hired by people who didn't have the slightest idea about tech. They got fooled quite often. Not on purpose, the engs they hired didn't know any better. This was also true for technical people who would hire outside their domain. Hardware people hiring web devs were also fooled often.

adim86 6y ago

There is a bias in this article and that is the context of time. Over time there will be less and less software engineers at the top of this list as software engineering becomes more common field of study. If you look at the people listed, they were people who set up these companies not to make money. I am not saying they are not interested in money, but if you were someone interested in mainly in making money within a reasonable time frame and you were intelligent at the times Google, FB and others were invented, building these companies would have not been the easiest way to make money at those times (dot com bubble etc). These people started these companies due to an obsession with the problem, the need to make a change etc. These companies have grown to be insane empires, not because it has been software engineers running them, but software engineering is a new field that greatly impacts the world at this time and they are the people that solved the harder mainstream problems at the time. If this was in the industrial age, we would see more blacksmiths and manufacturers and railroad builders on the list, than farmers or accountants or whatever. It is a mixture of time, depth of problem and an obsession to solve it. Not that there is something intrinsically special about software engineers

chadash 6y ago

This question might as well be, why are so many software engineers founders of software companies? Well, duh. What would be notable is if there were many software engineers leading non-software companies. That does not seem to be the case.

harpiaharpyja 6y ago

The first thing that comes to mind is that correlation is not causation. The author says nothing to address that. In fact, not far into the article they effectively state they're just going to assume that his hypothesis is correct and then proceeds to hunt for reasons why. This raises all kinds of red flags for me. I'm sure you don't have to look far for a common cause explanation of the hypothesis.

mathattack 6y ago

The answer seems too obvious to state. Companies with SW at the core need someone who knows what’s feasible. Same reason why Berkshire Hathaway (on their list) has a Financier at the core - they’re in the Capital allocation business. It’s why most law firms are run by a lawyer. And why most research universities presidents have a PhD.

tgtweak 6y ago

I would imagine that in proportion to the amount of jobs in software engineering, the representation at CEO level is disproportionately small compared to other fields.

amazingfall 6y ago

The arrogance of engineers who seem to think they're better than everyone else will be it's downfall.

samlosodesign 6y ago

It’s because there is clearly an overvaluation problem in tech right now. ‘Successful’ depends on the ways you are measuring success.

TeeWEE 6y ago

Stopped reading after seeing this: "Amazon.com $1,432B Yes, Bezos" Bezos is not a programmer.

dnh44 6y ago
From his Wikipedia entry: >In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

nottorp 6y ago

highly publicized succesful CEOs? In domains that are either all IT or where IT is a key part? :)

anyonecancode 6y ago

Another version of the question -- why are so many successful companies centered on software? Asked that way, CEOs with developer or software engineering experience isn't so surprising, but leads to the more interesting questions around software's prominent role in our current economy. I suspect that within 25 years that mix will change as being a "software company" will become less of a meaningful distinction (and to some degree already is -- what is a "tech" company these days?). Every company will be a "software company" and won't lean as heavily on its leadership being having a specific background in technology. ETA - ah, looking at comments I see others have already made the same point.

Tycho 6y ago

I think software engineering gives people visceral feedback on principles/strategies that transfer well to other domains, but aren't as obvious to people in other domains. For instance: loose coupling, modularity, type checking, unit testing, avoiding side-effects, information hiding, readability, continuous integration, version control, service oriented architecture, reusability, many-eyes, (a)synchronicity, buffering, caching, portability, redundancy, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, avoiding premature optimization, rapid iteration, relational and object modeling, infosec, complexity analysis, scalability, technical debt. And, of course, any modern organization is totally dependent on software in some way, so understanding this stuff is always going to be helpful for a CEO when making related hiring decisions and signing contracts.

IncRnd 6y ago

The title and what are shown in the article do not match. The headline shows, "...CEOs software engineer...," yet the article shows, "...founding CEOs software engineer..." This is a huge difference. Half of the Founding CEOs shown are not actual software engineers but other types of engineers. In the vein of the article, "Why do article writers make basic off-by-one errors, engage in clickbait, and treat logical fallacies as the truth?"

meiraleal 6y ago

The same way many engineers are successful CEOs: software engineers are successful in general because it is a profession that CAN make you smarter every day. It is too easy to see the value of compound interest.

analog31 6y ago

I think the most striking thing to notice in that list is that the top 7 or so businesses are closely related to software. The article alludes to the fact that software is a big industry. And those businesses all seem to share a similarity, which is that they chose as their CEO the person who happened to have founded the business, or who owns / owned it outright. These are also people who have figured out how to make software development work for them, not kill them. That's huge. An interesting study would be to see how people with software engineering background (by some agreed upon definition) fare as CEO's of companies that they didn't start or own. Granted, that might take more time and study.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

In the past, accounting was the most important aspect of running a business. Now that is secondary to IT.

cymon 6y ago

Has anybody else noticed that list is dominated by American companies? Should we be asking why are are American software engineer led companies dominating the list?

corpMaverick 6y ago

Anecdotal. Back in the day, I worked for a large distribution company where the CEO, CCO, CFO, and COO came from IT. When you looked through the code you could still see their commits. They had a unique perspective because they had in their minds giant maps of how everything connected behind scenes. Purchasing, orders, payments, receivables, inventory, etc. For example. The people in purchasing only knew how purchasing worked but they didn't understand how the system connected with finance or operations. But the C* executives knew, and understood what was possible and what difficult. They were very effective. It was a pleasure working with them. To this day I think it was a great model.

icedchai 6y ago

I used to point this out to a founder of a former company. He'd reject out ideas and suggestions, then make jokes like "there's a reason engineers aren't CEOs!" I had to remind him of all the successful companies run by engineers. The best tech startups I've worked for had technical CEOs or co-founders with engineering backgrounds ("best" meaning good to work for and most successful.) Worst were guys who thought they were going to somehow be the next Bill Gates just because he didn't graduate college, either.

Barrin92 6y ago

I'm not sure I follow the methodology here. Apple isn't worth 2 trillion because of Wozniak, who hasn't been at the company in decades. It's worth that much because it's a technology company, and technology is profitable, and almost tautologically founders of technology companies are technologists. However many if not all of these companies have gained most of their market value under the management of fairly ordinary business-type CEOs and management, who at best have some expertise in a technical field.

jcfrei 6y ago

There are so many things wrong with just using market cap as a proxy for success. A better measure (if you want to use equity prices) would be change in share price during the tenure of the CEO relative to their industry peer group. I think that's also the basis for most CEO compensations. Market caps change based on discount rates, time in the economic cycle, financial structure of the company (debt vs equity), share buyback programs, equity offerings, etc, etc.

drtournier 6y ago

I wonder how much classic survival bias plays a role in this. Since most startups fail and the failure is usually due to lack of cashflow, startups that has the founder as a software engineer can have more bootstrap resources. Which potentially increases the chance of these companies to cross the chasm.

alistairSH 6y ago

What a ridiculous question. The article itself explains it: software is swallowing the world. 7 of the top 10 companies by market cap are software companies (or closely related). Do bankers tend to lead banking companies? A cursory glance at the top-5 banks in the US indicates that to be the case. They were largely founded by, and are currently run by, bankers.

hinkley 6y ago
"Kid, never write software for a hardware company." The reason I was given for this advice is that they don't understand how iterations work in software, and so they can grossly misunderstand your level of doneness. This is first a big headache and then a source of post-release problems because you end up rushing things out. Getting more software-savvy people into management in more industries would definitely help with that.

r0s 6y ago

They touch on it, but I think one crucial benefit is the ability to see the scope of software work in general, which in turn drives and defines modern business. Unrealistic scope expectations are a huge problem for business people without the technical background to intuit pitfalls.

crazygringo 6y ago

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous article. If you actually want to show that software engineers wind up being more successful CEO's then you can't look at the top 10 companies, there is virtually zero statistical significance here whatsoever. Instead, take a look at the Fortune 500 at a minimum (or better yet, all publicly traded companies). And then you need to rigorously define what makes a CEO "better" -- which isn't market cap. Indeed, it could trivially be the case that software engineers fail 10x as often as other founders, but that they found 100x more companies so they have more absolute successes. The only thing that the top-10 shows is that there are a lot of tech companies in the top 10, and that tech companies tend to be founded by software engineers, while non-tech companies aren't. Which is... about as surprising as saying that mega-financial companies tend to be founded by bankers, or that restaurants tend to be founded by chefs.

didibus 6y ago

I'm not sure why it's so surprising that tech companies are more successful when the CEO is tech aware. Understanding the challenges of software engineering and development and knowing the range of feasibilities for what software can and cannot solve with an intuition into the effort and cost of each is for sure an advantage as a CEO when running a software driven company. I'd say if you don't have that perspective and are CEO of a software driven company, I'd make sure that you have a very close group of constant SE advisers to help you out.

xiaosun 6y ago

I know I'm being repetitive of points already made by prior posters, but the logical fallacy of this article is so egregious that I can't help but post it again. The opening paragraph of this article: "From the onset, we have chosen to use one of Wall Street's measures of a better CEO – namely, market cap. In other words, by this measure, CEOs that create the most value are the best CEOs. Sure, there are other measures perhaps more virtuous; but market capital is well-known, generally reliable, and historically trended. So, let’s just roll with it as our measure of “better CEOs” as we have lots to discuss. An objective review of the data leads to the conclusion: top companies are increasingly founded and managed by software engineers." The first 100 words in this paragraph and the "objective conclusion" drawn is all you need to read to know the remaining 7000+ words are completely logically flawed. It's like making the assertion "the best restaurants in the world serve the most meals, so an objective review of the data leads to the conclusion that fast food restaurants have the best chefs."

rajacombinator 6y ago

TLDR article but seems it, and most of the top level comments here surprisingly miss the obvious answer. Software engineers practice systematic logical thinking on a daily basis. Most other fields do not, and if you’ve worked for people from those fields, you’ve certainly seen the lack of structured thinking. Combine structured logical thinking about systems and processes with a few of the other skills needed to succeed as a founder and you can go very far.

ffggvv 6y ago

maybe because its a lot easier to code a side project and build it from there then to have to hire someone just to build your MVP? In addition, you're likely to know other engineers you can recruit.