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> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked

by zer8k 3y ago

> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as fungible. The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly get away with in the current market. This is the only industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem. Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview + colonoscopy their engineers do.

eru 3y ago
> Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. My comment was specifically talking about startups. Not about stable companies. Please see context of the preceeding comment, too.
ska 3y ago
> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.
- zer8k 3y ago
  If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great. I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it. But I think its neither controversial nor false that engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most executives to write even half competent software. Outside of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have reported to generally have been out of engineering for a long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to someone so out of touch with their field.
  - nickserv 3y ago
    I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to. Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team. And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management? So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success. Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)
    - JamesBarney 3y ago
      > tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
      - nickserv 3y ago
        I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later. Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years. Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
      - jimbokun 3y ago
        I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows. For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything. With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers. Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.
jimbokun 3y ago
The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code. So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?

by zer8k 3y ago

eru 3y ago

> Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. My comment was specifically talking about startups. Not about stable companies. Please see context of the preceeding comment, too.

ska 3y ago

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

zer8k 3y ago
If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great. I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it. But I think its neither controversial nor false that engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most executives to write even half competent software. Outside of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have reported to generally have been out of engineering for a long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to someone so out of touch with their field.
- nickserv 3y ago
  I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to. Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team. And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management? So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success. Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)
  - JamesBarney 3y ago
    > tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
    - nickserv 3y ago
      I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later. Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years. Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows. For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything. With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
jimbokun 3y ago
Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers. Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.

jimbokun 3y ago

The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code. So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?