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> He himself had no ability to work with technology... But he knew who did Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engine

> He himself had no ability to work with technology... But he knew who did Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics. However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.) The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.

btilly 13y ago
However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. This is where you're wrong. You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters. What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.