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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
by 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 agoGetting 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 agoYeah, 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 agoSorry 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
- xmprt 6y agoDid Wozniak ever hold the title of CEO?
- sebmellen 6y agoYes, I did, which is why I find it so disingenuous. I mean, looking at their chart, 7/10 do not have software engineer CEOs. And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple. "Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup). -- Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com https://shortlyai.com type of stuff. > Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value). Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.) They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.
- Number157 6y ago> And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple. In terms of title? No. In terms of function? Well sure, he's a co-founder.
- mav3rick 6y agoI think cracking the JEE at that time was clearly correlated to him being smart. He was obviously going to be successful wherever he went.
- Number157 6y ago> Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either. The article actually refers to Jobs & Wozniak.
- UncleMeat 6y agoWoz was a cofounder, not a CEO.
- arethuza 6y ago"Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer." My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).
- marcus_holmes 6y agoMy view as a developer with an MBA is that I got it because the hardest problems I was facing were people/political/business problems rather than tech problems. I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.
- replyifuagree 6y agoRegarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well. Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer. Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. Well, Sergey and Larry failed in writing their initial crawler in C (they even published a paper on how not to write a crawler in C), so paid a programmer to write it in python. I believe he became employee #1.
- sebmellen 6y agoThen they should revise the title to "Software engineers make the best founders." To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;). I mean, read this: > After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders. What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices" This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.
- replyifuagree 6y agoTo your note on Bezos, this section of the article is what really juxtaposed nicely for me with your comment on Bezos not coding: >So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes. I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.
- solumos 6y agoDefinitely. I'd be interested to see how this breaks down for the S&P 500, with more rigor around what constitutes an engineer - maybe have different categories?
- hef19898 6y agoThere is a common trope around engineers being better managers and CEo in germany as we.. Not software, but engineers in general. Everyody always points at the successfull ones, only to forget that some of the biggest business fuck ups, e.g. VW, happened under engineering CEOs (without MBAs).
- LMYahooTFY 6y agoFurthermore, IMO there are a ton of questionable assumptions littered throughout the article. The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.
- hntrader 6y agoAgreed. A plausible explanation for why the largest companies are tech companies is low marginal cost of replication combined with widespread appeal combined with network effects and IP moat which confers monopoly margins. Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins. The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.
- necovek 6y agoI do, but for slightly different reasons. Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure. Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling. And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.
- rorykoehler 6y agoOnce a software engineer always a software engineer when it comes to management perspective.
- replyifuagree 6y agoCoding really does teach something that I've never learned anyplace else. I've also done just about zero in the arts, so maybe there are some parallels there, I should try music or painting someday to see. I know for sure that math and engineering classes didn't teach me what coding taught me.
- dogma1138 6y agoAnd what would that be exactly?
- kuu 6y agoFor me it's at least the following: - Attention to detail - Control of flow (if this then that) mentality - More binary thinking - Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity) - A lot of frustration tolerance :) That's at least my experience
- GeneBond 6y agoHi, I'm the original author. The point of the article is as follows: there is clearly a trend towards top market-cap companies being founded by software engineering CEOs, but why? The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. I believe there are two reasons: 1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on. 2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages. Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82 https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well). As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.
- okl 6y ago> The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. Apparently it's not, see parent comment. Doubling-down and ignoring the criticism is downright dishonest.
- tinco 6y ago8/10 companies on your list are software companies, of those 7/8 have software engineer CEO's. The only thing you've shown is that successful software companies are often led by software engineers. I bet you'll find similar patterns in other industries. Who better to have visionary leadership than an engineer who grasps the industry perfectly. I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous?" Yes. The original HN title was something like "Software engineers make the best CEOS, if measured by market cap".
- finchisko 6y agoI think, that is the power of word "many". If the claim was "1% of all CEOs are sw engineers", it wouldn't be that impressive, even though 1% may be actually quite lot of people (many). :)
- Number157 6y ago> Google/Alphabet's current CEO Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful. > Apple's current CEO... Same thing. > Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer. True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title. > Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
- 533474 6y agoWozniak was not a software engineer either; he was an EE
- jiofih 6y agoWith a masters degree in CS...
- camhart 6y agoSo you can only be a software engineer if you studied computer science? Not any other highly technical degree that's regularly hired into software engineering positions?
- Macha 6y agoAs were most software engineers in those days? It would be a while before CS and specific software software related fields of study took off
- amelius 6y agoEven today, most EEs at e.g. CPU companies have jobs which are more CS than EE.
- erhk 6y agoSimilarly not a single person graduated in deep learning 2000-2010
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoYeah I mean they're all CEO's, they don't do software engineering as far as I know. Maybe they once did, 15-20 years ago, and maybe that was their major in uni, but I think it's a bad trend to put a label on people based on what they went to school for. What you pick in school is not your life, and real life / work experience is more educational than the education system (in my experience, but then, I'm college level at best). So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.
- Ensorceled 6y agoI'm pushing 60 and university is STILL one of the most formative events, if not the most formative event, in my lifetime.
- mordae 6y agoAnything you do in your twenties ends up being the most formative in general.
- Ensorceled 6y agoSort of my point, saying that what you majored in uni doesn't matter is a bit silly.
- sebmellen 6y agoSay I majored in physics and went on to get a masters in fine arts and became a world-renowned screenwriter, would you call me a mathematician? That’s argument is equivalent with claims that Cook is a software engineer.
- samatman 6y agoThat seems overly reductive. Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers. It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science or, like, history?
- Grustaf 6y agoI agree with you except about Bezos, the point is not if you work as a developer while you're the CEO, if that was the metric no CEO of a large company would "be" anything.
- lbblack 6y agoYup! Lazy work gets lazy solutions!
- some_random 6y agoYeah, this seems more like "why are software companies more successful". Looking at only the top 10 companies then speculating seems like a waste of time, why not just omit the data entirely at this point?
- SavantIdiot 6y agoIt reads like an ego stroke of how awesome software engineers are compared to all the other plebes in the world. Also: being a monopoly helps.
- radihuq 6y agoI think that early Amazon employee you're referring to is Paul Davis[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulDavisThe1st https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulDavisThe1st
- sebmellen 6y agoYou got it! Thanks :)