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My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know

My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead. With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having that role. With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas. I love knowing that our CEO is one heck of an inspiring guy but I don't want him meddling in engineering. I'm sure he's smart enough that he could figure it out, but that would be a waste of his talent. Right now, his brilliance is evident in the people he's put into leadership. They're all experts of their domain. This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding)

realityking 6y ago
My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them. The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.
caturopath 6y ago
> With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas...This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding) I think you're missing one thing here that makes it a little more analogous to your boss: not only should the CEO and your boss be good at their own jobs (e.g. securing funding), they should be good at their reports' jobs as well (just like yours is). Expertise that is 3+ layers down the org chart is completely irrelevant, of course, as you point out. There are executive situations where there's a lot of specialized knowledge one level below where this doesn't quite work, but that should garner lots of extra attention.

realityking 6y ago

My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them. The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.

caturopath 6y ago

> With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas...This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding) I think you're missing one thing here that makes it a little more analogous to your boss: not only should the CEO and your boss be good at their own jobs (e.g. securing funding), they should be good at their reports' jobs as well (just like yours is). Expertise that is 3+ layers down the org chart is completely irrelevant, of course, as you point out. There are executive situations where there's a lot of specialized knowledge one level below where this doesn't quite work, but that should garner lots of extra attention.