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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

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.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Send me a copy of your resume, check the profile. Although NL might be a place where there isn't a lot of programming market, I'd be willing to bet the resume needs a bit of work.
    - M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
      NL? Natural Language?
      - boring_twenties 6y ago
        Netherlands, I'd assume
        mettamage 6y ago
        Netherlands
harlanji 6y ago
You can call yourself a developer if you do a startup. I distunguish SEs based on how deep they go. Developers can throw up a house in the suburbs. An engineer might be needed to extract water or something specific. CS is a good qualifer for an engineer, while a developer can be the neighbor kid.
- isamuel 6y ago
  This is a better way of putting the point I was inelegantly grasping at. The neighbor kid is just an industrious kid---they happen to be nailing up drywall, but it's not that nailing up the drywall is why they end up running Berkshire Hathaway (or whatever) later. It's that they're industrious, and have various other traits that---in some other context---would result in them doing whatever else. Maybe they turn into the engineer who can extract water, if only for reasons of path-dependency. And in a world where water-extraction is a valuable industry, that path-dependent contingency will result in them maybe starting a valuable water-extraction engineering firm. But it's not that nailing up drywall as a kid made them uniquely qualified. It's that they were industrious and smart and had sufficient fortune and whatever else. Which is good, all that stuff is good.
  - baremetal 6y ago
    not to be pedantic but drywall is screwed in not nailed. i happen to be a software engineer who has also built actual houses.
    - isamuel 6y ago
      You can do both. Usually, nails go along the outside and screws in the "field," but I'll confess that it's been 30 years since I helped my dad do it (I was a big help, I'm sure) so perhaps the state of the art has changed.
    - BackBlast 6y ago
      Once upon a time it was nailed. Screws are a relatively recent change, I've used both. The problem with nails is that they walk out over time. Secondarily, they can become "squeaky" when used in floors.
amelius 6y ago
> My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not? Because programming is too much fun.
bregma 6y ago
> hey aren't running Pfizer? Why not? Because there is no c-suite.stackexchange.com for them to cut-and-paste their corporate directives from.
- rendang 6y ago
  I would love to see a parodic interpretation of the questions and answers one would find on "c-suite.stackexchange.com"
onion2k 6y ago
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. There are 10 CEO level people mentioned. Woz could certainly get a job at Apple. He's clearly brilliant and capable. Larry & Sergey could definitely get jobs at Google. They were PhD CS students at Stanford (how on Earth is that "unqualified" to you?). Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code. Gates & Allen allegedly didn't do much actual coding themselves but they certainly understood it. I imagine Jobs, Bezos and Jack Ma also understood coding even if they didn't do any themselves. I don't know anything about Ma Huateng. I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff. Code isn't that hard that you need to be a special snowflake to do it.
- danielmarkbruce 6y ago
  You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...
  - codegladiator 6y ago
    You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's /dont/ fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of /passing/ their own swe interviews...
    - danielmarkbruce 6y ago
      You might be semi joking, so apologies if I took it too literally: I'm assuming nothing really. And we are saying almost the exact same thing. Many pass, many fail. Pretty good chance of succeeding, pretty good chance of failing.
  - pyrale 6y ago
    Maybe the issue is with the Google interview? I mean, plenty of very capable people are filtered out of Google and go on to do great things. It is bound to happen when you receive hundreds of applications and hire one person.
crispyambulance 6y ago
> there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. It depends on what you mean by "serious". Software development is very much a free-for-all as far as backgrounds go. It attracts people from all disciplines. There are NO CREDENTIALS needed to be called a "software engineer", and it will remain this way for the foreseeable future. Every organization that develops software has its own rules and standards for how they staff their teams, usually these rules are flexible to almost non-existent. They hire based on whether they think someone can do the work based on some loose evaluation criteria. But, yeah, a mid-to-late career-changer with a successful business background as highly paid executive is going to raise eyebrows if they go after some software development job-- not because of technical chops (assuming they still got it), but more "wtf are you thinking?" considerations. These people would normally just self-fund their own software projects, or partner with someone in exchange for having some fund with code (it happens). CEO demographics vary wildly. The article just cherry-picks the top ten market cap companies, which today, happen to dominated by software companies. Most of the CEO's have been SE's? So what? That means almost nothing. Are these 10 companies supposed to be profoundly representative of the world of work in some way?
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  > There are NO CREDENTIALS needed to be called a "software engineer" In the USA, maybe that's true. In Canada, for instance, there are legal requirements to being able to call yourself an Engineer. That's why "Software Developer" is used.
  - Jenk 6y ago
    I don't think that holds any weight. See this example I just picked off a search: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/958535/Software-Engineer https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/958535/Software-Engi...
    - theflyinghorse 6y ago
      That's an Americansim in a job posting. Likely the company wants to use the same language in US as well as in Canada. Noone I know in Canada is called Software Engineer, we all refer to ourselves as Software Developer.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> 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 Interestingly, you might be wrong. There's a continuing push to get people in the industry who can code for startups wanting to disrupt the space. You'd probably be the lawyer who can code and any lawyer-adjacent tech company would love you. When we think "programming", we think FAANG but in the real world, there are thousands of places that need basic code slung.
- apatters 6y ago
  Absolutely, he probably would not be the right hire to squeeze an extra 0.1% of performance out of Google search, but on any team which has to understand the needs of the legal industry (plenty of these at FAANG and non-FAANG companies) he could find himself in a senior role very quickly.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Yeah no shortage of Legal Discovery startups. Plus plenty of use for a lawyer-with-tech-skills when it comes to things like intellectual property laws, or just having someone who knows how to use Legal Hold software effectively.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Isn't the 'senior role' aligned with what he said though? He'd have the industry insight to design product roadmaps and UX wire frames in a PM type role, but wouldn't touch the codebase because he's a lawyer who wrote some code a long time ago, not a lawyer who codes, and the non-lawyers his team can hire have much more experience in actual software engineering.
    - apatters 6y ago
      The silos that individual contributors perceive tend to disintegrate as you move up the chain. If you're the GM of some product at a FAANG that has exposure to the legal industry, what you often find is there are tons of great developers you can hire internally, but not many people who have expertise in that vertical and can also be dangerous around the code. If a lawyer with a CS degree and a bit of coding background wanted to cross over and join your dev org you'd probably be happy to open whatever doors they need.
whalesalad 6y ago
If you think these guys couldn’t get a job as a software engineer you are deluding yourself.
- foepys 6y ago
  At FAANG? Maybe, maybe not. Definitely not without studying first. Here is the example of Max Howell who wrote Homebrew and couldn't get past the whiteboard interview at Google. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Who is Max Howell again? Author of Homebrew and... what?
Taylor_OD 6y ago
>> I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? Mick Napier who founded and runs The Annoyance where many famous comedians studied over the years, comedians who Second City would claim as graduates of their program like Tina Fey and Chris Farley, said they he doesn't like clamming taking the credit for successful graduates unless he also takes the credit for all the unsuccessful. That has always stuck with me.
asdfman123 6y ago
I'm not an expert, but my feeling is you'd need just three things to get back into Big Tech: 1) At least a year or two of experience at another programming job, 2) MONTHS of time studying whiteboarding, and maybe 3) A few good referrals. I know, because I'm 34 and I have 9 years of enterprise experience. I'm trying to get into Big Tech right now (I've interviewed with Google and Amazon and I'm about to do Facebook). I'm lucky though that I have an undergrad science degree from Stanford, so I have at least some credibility in that world and many of my former peers are in that space. The only really hard part is finding the will to study leetcode problems for hours. I have all sorts of thoughts on the subconscious motivations behind the whiteboard grind. It's sort of a hazing ritual. Or, like so many things in America, a class filter initially designed to not be a class filter: rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't. But ultimately, it's helpful to think of it as a game. Either play it or don't. There's no point in trying to resist it if my goal is ultimately to succeed personally. I keep getting rejected from Big Tech, but local firms are THROWING job offers at me just for being a decent, experienced programmer. I don't have much to complain about, other than the fact that I'd sort of like to make $400k for a little while and then drop out of society for a year or two. And I think the large majority of people realize leetcode != software engineering ability. They're just trading off a low false positive rate for a high false negative rate. My wife has also been spending months studying for the LSAT. It's really quite similar except I can work as programmer without formal credentials.
- aeoleonn 6y ago
  >rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't. No offense but I laugh at this thought. Because most people don't realize what they are actually capable of-- they'd rather make excuses. Excuses are easier to make than to sit down, intensely study, and build projects, in a public library, while living in a tent. And, I think a lot of people in the "special snowflake" mentality are afraid to recognize that a lot of poor people choose to be poor-- and even glorify it: much like the "gloating over/glorifying victimhood" movement. As someone who has spent almost a year living in a tent while studying technology, I beg to differ. I studied for free for several months, a few times, while living in a tent & in a cabin without running water/electricity. It simply requires a strategy to find: internet access, free food, low cost showers, relatively safe tent space near a town/city, etc. About 8 years ago I stopped working in entry level Marketing ($14/hr) to live in a tent (so as not to have to pay rent) and learn web design. It helped my get my first jobs. It's a long story-- after a few months, went back to work in digital marketing. Later, lived in a tent again to study web app dev. After dropping out of grad school (lived off loans while living in shack without water & electricity), lived in relative's living room in SF Bay area for 1-2 months while applying to jobs, and landed first programming job. There's nothing wrong with living in a tent, on a couch, etc-- whether rich or poor. Living poor didn't stop me-- the willpower to put in the work to actively learn (actively i.e. keeping journals of notes & building projects) is more important than having a place to live. Anyone can live in a tent and eat food from a food bank for a few months, and shower at a community center, while learning. (Assuming they don't have kids to take care of. If they have kids before getting their career skills together, well... that's just poor planning) Strategies involved: Motivational thinking. Motivational music. Cultivating positive thought processes. A strong belief in the economics data (bureau of labor statistics). And a strong belief that studying web dev will result in a job, assuming a person is organized, studies, and creates a relevant portfolio with projects. __________ Note: I have relatives who are currently quite poor, and have been as long as I've known them. Their problem as I see it? They refer to themselves as "Poor people" instead of "People who refuse to apply to jobs" or "People who refuse to research economically relevant skills and then build said skills in an organized manner". The reality is that being poor or not poor IS in their control. And they choose to be poor. Why? Because they choose not to do the alternative: work towards a strategy resulting in not being poor. I've counseled a cousin who is about my age. He prefers to wake up in the evening, smoke cannabis, stay up all night, and occasionally work manual labor jobs during the day. At age 30-ish. Yet is intelligent. Just chooses to prioritize instant gratification.
lumost 6y ago
The top 5 entries on this list were all from founders who wrote a significant portion of their companies original code. Granted, Larry and Sergei maybe aren't able to code to the Google standard anymore - but they once did. I don't see why it would be surprising that tech companies benefit from technical founders. When I see MBA/finance run companies my first thought is that they are almost certainly a finance, contracting, or marketing business even if on the outside they are a consumer product, mining, or manufacturing firm. Many mature businesses benefit from a financial viewpoint as CEO as there are no major innovations or risks to be done that can't be reasoned about on a spreadsheet. Tech has been on the other end of that spectrum for the last few decades.
offtop5 6y ago
I had the privilege of working under a CTO, who would personally write code for me when I got stuck. A big part of this was it was a smaller company, but even so I definitely think Hands-On founders make the best founders. Because you can essentially hop in and fix something, even if your other engineers are but stuck. Plus knowing that you can personally increase your wealth by 6 million dollars with a couple of good lines of code doesn't hurt.
dheera 6y ago
I think people are overthinking this in the comments. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule. Especially in fields whose core business isn't software. But in general it helps for founders to be able to, you know, actually build the thing they are trying to sell. I think that's all there is to it.
nostrademons 6y ago
This is reflective of the different roles for founders vs. software engineers, though. A technical founder's job is to show that a new software-based way of doing things is worth doing. A software engineer's job is to do it well. A necessary precondition for showing that something new & innovative is worth doing is usually to do it. It's not a sufficient condition though: you also need the risk tolerance to work on things new & innovative that may not work; you need the deep understanding of your problem to understand what the solution looks like; you need the location & social connections to access capital and hire real software engineers to scale your solution; and you need the judgment to hire the right people to fill in your skillset gaps. That's why most software engineers aren't off founding billion dollar companies. Note that this applies to other founder-led enterprises. Fred Koch was a hell of a chemist before Koch Industries became a huge conglomerate. Warren Buffett studied under one of the greatest value investors (Benjamin Graham) on Wall Street. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and railroad superintendent before becoming a steel magnate. You need that operational experience and domain knowledge before founding a world-changing company.
didibus 6y ago
Wozniak, Gates, Bezos, Larry, Sergey, Zuckerberg definitely all could code. I'm not sure why you are asserting otherwise?
jimbokun 6y ago
> Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? Because there are many more software engineering jobs in the world than CEO jobs. > 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. Which probably reflects more that the hiring process is broken, than that these people couldn't contribute to a business writing code. The real problem is that, in addition to writing code, they would also start identifying business opportunities and new ways to improve processes and increase revenues and cut costs, threatening the perceived job security of the people in management above them.

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.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Send me a copy of your resume, check the profile. Although NL might be a place where there isn't a lot of programming market, I'd be willing to bet the resume needs a bit of work.
  - M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
    NL? Natural Language?
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      Netherlands, I'd assume
      - mettamage 6y ago
        Netherlands

harlanji 6y ago

You can call yourself a developer if you do a startup. I distunguish SEs based on how deep they go. Developers can throw up a house in the suburbs. An engineer might be needed to extract water or something specific. CS is a good qualifer for an engineer, while a developer can be the neighbor kid.

isamuel 6y ago
This is a better way of putting the point I was inelegantly grasping at. The neighbor kid is just an industrious kid---they happen to be nailing up drywall, but it's not that nailing up the drywall is why they end up running Berkshire Hathaway (or whatever) later. It's that they're industrious, and have various other traits that---in some other context---would result in them doing whatever else. Maybe they turn into the engineer who can extract water, if only for reasons of path-dependency. And in a world where water-extraction is a valuable industry, that path-dependent contingency will result in them maybe starting a valuable water-extraction engineering firm. But it's not that nailing up drywall as a kid made them uniquely qualified. It's that they were industrious and smart and had sufficient fortune and whatever else. Which is good, all that stuff is good.
- baremetal 6y ago
  not to be pedantic but drywall is screwed in not nailed. i happen to be a software engineer who has also built actual houses.
  - isamuel 6y ago
    You can do both. Usually, nails go along the outside and screws in the "field," but I'll confess that it's been 30 years since I helped my dad do it (I was a big help, I'm sure) so perhaps the state of the art has changed.
  - BackBlast 6y ago
    Once upon a time it was nailed. Screws are a relatively recent change, I've used both. The problem with nails is that they walk out over time. Secondarily, they can become "squeaky" when used in floors.

amelius 6y ago

> My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not? Because programming is too much fun.

bregma 6y ago

> hey aren't running Pfizer? Why not? Because there is no c-suite.stackexchange.com for them to cut-and-paste their corporate directives from.

rendang 6y ago
I would love to see a parodic interpretation of the questions and answers one would find on "c-suite.stackexchange.com"

onion2k 6y ago

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. There are 10 CEO level people mentioned. Woz could certainly get a job at Apple. He's clearly brilliant and capable. Larry & Sergey could definitely get jobs at Google. They were PhD CS students at Stanford (how on Earth is that "unqualified" to you?). Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code. Gates & Allen allegedly didn't do much actual coding themselves but they certainly understood it. I imagine Jobs, Bezos and Jack Ma also understood coding even if they didn't do any themselves. I don't know anything about Ma Huateng. I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff. Code isn't that hard that you need to be a special snowflake to do it.

danielmarkbruce 6y ago
You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...
- codegladiator 6y ago
  You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's /dont/ fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of /passing/ their own swe interviews...
  - danielmarkbruce 6y ago
    You might be semi joking, so apologies if I took it too literally: I'm assuming nothing really. And we are saying almost the exact same thing. Many pass, many fail. Pretty good chance of succeeding, pretty good chance of failing.
- pyrale 6y ago
  Maybe the issue is with the Google interview? I mean, plenty of very capable people are filtered out of Google and go on to do great things. It is bound to happen when you receive hundreds of applications and hire one person.

crispyambulance 6y ago

> there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. It depends on what you mean by "serious". Software development is very much a free-for-all as far as backgrounds go. It attracts people from all disciplines. There are NO CREDENTIALS needed to be called a "software engineer", and it will remain this way for the foreseeable future. Every organization that develops software has its own rules and standards for how they staff their teams, usually these rules are flexible to almost non-existent. They hire based on whether they think someone can do the work based on some loose evaluation criteria. But, yeah, a mid-to-late career-changer with a successful business background as highly paid executive is going to raise eyebrows if they go after some software development job-- not because of technical chops (assuming they still got it), but more "wtf are you thinking?" considerations. These people would normally just self-fund their own software projects, or partner with someone in exchange for having some fund with code (it happens). CEO demographics vary wildly. The article just cherry-picks the top ten market cap companies, which today, happen to dominated by software companies. Most of the CEO's have been SE's? So what? That means almost nothing. Are these 10 companies supposed to be profoundly representative of the world of work in some way?

bluefirebrand 6y ago
> There are NO CREDENTIALS needed to be called a "software engineer" In the USA, maybe that's true. In Canada, for instance, there are legal requirements to being able to call yourself an Engineer. That's why "Software Developer" is used.
- Jenk 6y ago
  I don't think that holds any weight. See this example I just picked off a search: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/958535/Software-Engineer https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/958535/Software-Engi...
  - theflyinghorse 6y ago
    That's an Americansim in a job posting. Likely the company wants to use the same language in US as well as in Canada. Noone I know in Canada is called Software Engineer, we all refer to ourselves as Software Developer.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> 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 Interestingly, you might be wrong. There's a continuing push to get people in the industry who can code for startups wanting to disrupt the space. You'd probably be the lawyer who can code and any lawyer-adjacent tech company would love you. When we think "programming", we think FAANG but in the real world, there are thousands of places that need basic code slung.

apatters 6y ago
Absolutely, he probably would not be the right hire to squeeze an extra 0.1% of performance out of Google search, but on any team which has to understand the needs of the legal industry (plenty of these at FAANG and non-FAANG companies) he could find himself in a senior role very quickly.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Yeah no shortage of Legal Discovery startups. Plus plenty of use for a lawyer-with-tech-skills when it comes to things like intellectual property laws, or just having someone who knows how to use Legal Hold software effectively.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Isn't the 'senior role' aligned with what he said though? He'd have the industry insight to design product roadmaps and UX wire frames in a PM type role, but wouldn't touch the codebase because he's a lawyer who wrote some code a long time ago, not a lawyer who codes, and the non-lawyers his team can hire have much more experience in actual software engineering.
  - apatters 6y ago
    The silos that individual contributors perceive tend to disintegrate as you move up the chain. If you're the GM of some product at a FAANG that has exposure to the legal industry, what you often find is there are tons of great developers you can hire internally, but not many people who have expertise in that vertical and can also be dangerous around the code. If a lawyer with a CS degree and a bit of coding background wanted to cross over and join your dev org you'd probably be happy to open whatever doors they need.

whalesalad 6y ago

If you think these guys couldn’t get a job as a software engineer you are deluding yourself.

foepys 6y ago
At FAANG? Maybe, maybe not. Definitely not without studying first. Here is the example of Max Howell who wrote Homebrew and couldn't get past the whiteboard interview at Google. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  Who is Max Howell again? Author of Homebrew and... what?

Taylor_OD 6y ago

>> I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? Mick Napier who founded and runs The Annoyance where many famous comedians studied over the years, comedians who Second City would claim as graduates of their program like Tina Fey and Chris Farley, said they he doesn't like clamming taking the credit for successful graduates unless he also takes the credit for all the unsuccessful. That has always stuck with me.

asdfman123 6y ago

I'm not an expert, but my feeling is you'd need just three things to get back into Big Tech: 1) At least a year or two of experience at another programming job, 2) MONTHS of time studying whiteboarding, and maybe 3) A few good referrals. I know, because I'm 34 and I have 9 years of enterprise experience. I'm trying to get into Big Tech right now (I've interviewed with Google and Amazon and I'm about to do Facebook). I'm lucky though that I have an undergrad science degree from Stanford, so I have at least some credibility in that world and many of my former peers are in that space. The only really hard part is finding the will to study leetcode problems for hours. I have all sorts of thoughts on the subconscious motivations behind the whiteboard grind. It's sort of a hazing ritual. Or, like so many things in America, a class filter initially designed to not be a class filter: rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't. But ultimately, it's helpful to think of it as a game. Either play it or don't. There's no point in trying to resist it if my goal is ultimately to succeed personally. I keep getting rejected from Big Tech, but local firms are THROWING job offers at me just for being a decent, experienced programmer. I don't have much to complain about, other than the fact that I'd sort of like to make $400k for a little while and then drop out of society for a year or two. And I think the large majority of people realize leetcode != software engineering ability. They're just trading off a low false positive rate for a high false negative rate. My wife has also been spending months studying for the LSAT. It's really quite similar except I can work as programmer without formal credentials.

aeoleonn 6y ago
>rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't. No offense but I laugh at this thought. Because most people don't realize what they are actually capable of-- they'd rather make excuses. Excuses are easier to make than to sit down, intensely study, and build projects, in a public library, while living in a tent. And, I think a lot of people in the "special snowflake" mentality are afraid to recognize that a lot of poor people choose to be poor-- and even glorify it: much like the "gloating over/glorifying victimhood" movement. As someone who has spent almost a year living in a tent while studying technology, I beg to differ. I studied for free for several months, a few times, while living in a tent & in a cabin without running water/electricity. It simply requires a strategy to find: internet access, free food, low cost showers, relatively safe tent space near a town/city, etc. About 8 years ago I stopped working in entry level Marketing ($14/hr) to live in a tent (so as not to have to pay rent) and learn web design. It helped my get my first jobs. It's a long story-- after a few months, went back to work in digital marketing. Later, lived in a tent again to study web app dev. After dropping out of grad school (lived off loans while living in shack without water & electricity), lived in relative's living room in SF Bay area for 1-2 months while applying to jobs, and landed first programming job. There's nothing wrong with living in a tent, on a couch, etc-- whether rich or poor. Living poor didn't stop me-- the willpower to put in the work to actively learn (actively i.e. keeping journals of notes & building projects) is more important than having a place to live. Anyone can live in a tent and eat food from a food bank for a few months, and shower at a community center, while learning. (Assuming they don't have kids to take care of. If they have kids before getting their career skills together, well... that's just poor planning) Strategies involved: Motivational thinking. Motivational music. Cultivating positive thought processes. A strong belief in the economics data (bureau of labor statistics). And a strong belief that studying web dev will result in a job, assuming a person is organized, studies, and creates a relevant portfolio with projects. __________ Note: I have relatives who are currently quite poor, and have been as long as I've known them. Their problem as I see it? They refer to themselves as "Poor people" instead of "People who refuse to apply to jobs" or "People who refuse to research economically relevant skills and then build said skills in an organized manner". The reality is that being poor or not poor IS in their control. And they choose to be poor. Why? Because they choose not to do the alternative: work towards a strategy resulting in not being poor. I've counseled a cousin who is about my age. He prefers to wake up in the evening, smoke cannabis, stay up all night, and occasionally work manual labor jobs during the day. At age 30-ish. Yet is intelligent. Just chooses to prioritize instant gratification.

lumost 6y ago

The top 5 entries on this list were all from founders who wrote a significant portion of their companies original code. Granted, Larry and Sergei maybe aren't able to code to the Google standard anymore - but they once did. I don't see why it would be surprising that tech companies benefit from technical founders. When I see MBA/finance run companies my first thought is that they are almost certainly a finance, contracting, or marketing business even if on the outside they are a consumer product, mining, or manufacturing firm. Many mature businesses benefit from a financial viewpoint as CEO as there are no major innovations or risks to be done that can't be reasoned about on a spreadsheet. Tech has been on the other end of that spectrum for the last few decades.

offtop5 6y ago

I had the privilege of working under a CTO, who would personally write code for me when I got stuck. A big part of this was it was a smaller company, but even so I definitely think Hands-On founders make the best founders. Because you can essentially hop in and fix something, even if your other engineers are but stuck. Plus knowing that you can personally increase your wealth by 6 million dollars with a couple of good lines of code doesn't hurt.

dheera 6y ago

I think people are overthinking this in the comments. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule. Especially in fields whose core business isn't software. But in general it helps for founders to be able to, you know, actually build the thing they are trying to sell. I think that's all there is to it.

nostrademons 6y ago

This is reflective of the different roles for founders vs. software engineers, though. A technical founder's job is to show that a new software-based way of doing things is worth doing. A software engineer's job is to do it well. A necessary precondition for showing that something new & innovative is worth doing is usually to do it. It's not a sufficient condition though: you also need the risk tolerance to work on things new & innovative that may not work; you need the deep understanding of your problem to understand what the solution looks like; you need the location & social connections to access capital and hire real software engineers to scale your solution; and you need the judgment to hire the right people to fill in your skillset gaps. That's why most software engineers aren't off founding billion dollar companies. Note that this applies to other founder-led enterprises. Fred Koch was a hell of a chemist before Koch Industries became a huge conglomerate. Warren Buffett studied under one of the greatest value investors (Benjamin Graham) on Wall Street. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and railroad superintendent before becoming a steel magnate. You need that operational experience and domain knowledge before founding a world-changing company.

didibus 6y ago

Wozniak, Gates, Bezos, Larry, Sergey, Zuckerberg definitely all could code. I'm not sure why you are asserting otherwise?

jimbokun 6y ago

> Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? Because there are many more software engineering jobs in the world than CEO jobs. > 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. Which probably reflects more that the hiring process is broken, than that these people couldn't contribute to a business writing code. The real problem is that, in addition to writing code, they would also start identifying business opportunities and new ways to improve processes and increase revenues and cut costs, threatening the perceived job security of the people in management above them.