Usually the problem boils down to judgment. They cannot tell who is producing the core value of the enterprise. They create unnecessary work. They add useless process. They have bizarre and unworkable ideas for products. They don't understand how to correctly price talent, and to retain it. They don't have the humility to know what they don't know. They overestimate how much they add to the enterprise.
The good people end up jumping ship and they are left with a rump of pure mediocrity, if anything at all.
It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. If I’m a director who was hired into the culture when that mattered, and now I’m several steps under a boss who flouts that, that’s a huge upsetting culture change.
Now luckily, he’s only going to be in this job for a few months so the damage will be largely mitigated, but still. This is an idiots game and it doesn’t make us smarter for trying to nit it to being acceptable. It’s not.
Having independent knowledge and skills would enable him to discover when he is being lied to, and usually prevent the attempt.
But he has been installed to direct budget to certain parties outside government, and can probably succeed at that. He might have been installed to commit the DoD to continue delivering budget to those parties long after he has been dismissed.
Apply this principle to elite-university admissions, big-tech hiring, or to developed-country citizenship and see how far you get with it.
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.h...
It was about how in principle he can reason about markets, but it takes forever and „it all becomes very sad“. Or something like that.
edit: found it https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recrui...
„ These softball questions seem too easy, so when I first started asking them, I had to admit that I really expected everyone to sail right through them. What I discovered was that everybody solved the problem, but there was a lot of variation in how long it took them to solve.
That reminded me of why I couldn’t trade bonds for a living.
Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture.
And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.“
I view it as necessary, but not sufficient by itself.
It really depends on the role and the organization and where Kratsios is a degree in Political Science is going to be valuable. The role of CTO is not to be the most technical person in the room, but rather to lead the most technical people in the organization. This requires technical acumen, but more so requires good communication and leadership skills.