Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.
[0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment.
Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
The article actually refers to Jobs & Wozniak.
> *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs
"Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup).
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Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com type of stuff.
> Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value).
Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.)
They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.
In terms of title? No. In terms of function? Well sure, he's a co-founder.
In a small company, every person has enough influence to rival the CEO and every role overlaps enough that the distinction given by titles is meaningless inside the company. Mainly the distinction given by titles determines how people market themselves outside the company where the dividing roles will appear clear for marketing purposes, which they are not in reality.
My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).
I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.
Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.
> Apple's current CEO...
Same thing.
> Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
> Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer
He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.
>True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.
>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.
People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".
Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.
The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.
Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins.
The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.
Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure.
Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling.
And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.
Yes.
The original HN title was something like "Software engineers make the best CEOS, if measured by market cap".
Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer.
Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.
To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;).
I mean, read this:
> After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders.
What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices"
This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.
Read the potential value portion of article or read further about my understanding of value here: https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
"Economic value is also theorized to be the universal organizing force of secular society, and the nature of value is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the three dominant value management systems, each having proceeded out of its own particular value state. Individual contributors are often attracted to a particular type of value, and they are therefore intrinsically motivated by the unique properties of that value type. Often, humans perceive their own value to society in terms of their ability to produce or replicate a thing of value such as a meal, or concert, or a manufactured good. Others might perceive their value in terms of their net worth, and creative individuals might perceive their value in terms of their ability to discover new solutions or their ability to create new works of value."
>So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes.
I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.
No that doesn't remain to be seen. Tim Cook is clearly one of the most successful CEOs of all time. Compare Apple now to Apple when Jobs died.
Apple certainly won't fall because of their sheer size and momentum (just like Microsoft never did), but we look at things differently at that scale and for a while, Microsoft was "stagnant" and "backtracking".
I don't know how people define "most successful CEOs of all time", but I do know that predicting future is a fool's errand (you can go into statistics and risk evaluation, but here we are talking about one person thus not much room for "statistics": I mean, everyone who's hugely successful but then hugely fails has been mostly hugely successful right until they failed).
Operations is great to have and Cook is really good at it. Focus on ops can destroy the creative process though.
I figure another 8 years and we'll know for sure (Ballmer clocked in at 14). I look forward to being wrong, Cook is a great human being.
During that time, their stock price fell at least 10%. The launch of Windows Vista was bungled (XP outlived Vista). They had a string of failures in the phone market, before finally abandoning it. They had a string of failed acquisitions, including Nokia. Remember the Microsoft Stores?
Azure was the only real lasting success acheived under Ballmer.
Fixed the typo.
Tim Cook is about 2/3rds through of Ballmer's tenure. If you were to take a bet today, do you see Tim Cook doing the direction of Ballmer?
How many more trillion dollar do you need , to give Tim Cook his due credit for operational excellence
Whenever I was buying a new laptop, I've only considered MacBooks because they did one thing I cared about a lot (high resolution displays in portable machines), and they were usually cheaper[1] compared to laptops I went for (lately X1 Carbons: worse performance [lower TDP CPUs], better battery life, worse but acceptable screen, keyboards way ahead — in essense, better keyboards and Linux compatibility + nicer design [personal take :] for worse performance and pricing on par or worse than MacBooks). M1 Macs now win even on battery life too, so it's going to be even harder to stay away from them going forward.
Still, keyboards and Linux compatibility will likely keep me in the HP/Thinkpad business lines for longer, but pricing is not the factor when it comes to choosing Apple computers or not for some jobs.
[1] Configuring a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen brings the Linux + i7-10610U 1.8GHz/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/2560x1440 screen up to $2022 today (down from "retail" price of $3140, which I hope nobody is paying anywhere, ever), and for roughly that money you get a 13" Macbook Pro with i5 ("up to 3.8GHz"), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 2560x1600 13" screen.
With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.
- Attention to detail
- Control of flow (if this then that) mentality
- More binary thinking
- Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity)
- A lot of frustration tolerance :)
That's at least my experience
I can get that you usually don't get it from regular high school mathematics, but even there one should learn to deal with proofs and deducing stuff in a precise, non-ambiguous way, and you have to pay attention to detail.
Coding allowed me to build things with my analytical mind liking precision and patterns, so it's the way for my "mathematical" brain to express creativity.
Really? Should we count how many bugs happen due to type conversion, precision errors, off by one etc?
Probabilistic programming and machine learning do!
A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
Like personally I would wager that most programmers do not understand exactly what they are building when they start, I know I don’t always and I never really met anyone who does so either at least not constantly. You know the general direction then you tend to hack things until they work and optimize and fix edge cases as needed.
We very much can write programs without understanding what we need to do or even how things work otherwise we wouldn’t have bugs that are not hardware errata and even then one can argue that if you truly know what you are doing you plan for hardware failure.
What makes you think I underestimate those other disciplines? I do not. The other disciplines tend to focus on tangible rather than on abstraction. Programming (if you want to actually be good at it) requires you to tackle abstractions all day long. My theory is that that ability translates (in some people!) to being better CEO.
> B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
You are mixing stuff here. I can guarantee you that if you know what you want to build and have the clarity to make the right choices, the hacky project will turn out better than if you don't. Specific development practices (e.g. hacks vs. no hacks) has no relation to personal ability to formulate clear problem statement.
Formulating a clear problem statement is applicable to essentially every field and I would argue is probably the hardest thing to master and what most people fail at.
At least personally the most improvement I have experienced in formulating a problem statement had nothing to do with actual technical work but rather when I worked in professional services and had to come up with new service offerings, writing up proposals and managing stakeholders.
Formulating a problem is definitely a soft skill that I would say most purely technical programs don’t teach that well, quite often because you are given the problem statement to solve. This is also true for technical work and why some people might find it hard to progress in their careers. I’ve met plenty of brilliant and highly experienced engineers that suffer from major tunnel vision and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.
Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers.
It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science or, like, history?
It’s not like history is some useless knowledge. Software engineering is still the new hotness. Give it time and the headline will change to why meteor engineers make the best CEOs while we all pine for the days we sat on top
1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on. 2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages.
Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well).
As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.
I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.
IMO, the answer to why the biggest companies tend to be started by software engineers is far far simpler and something you can find in your ordinary econ 101 textbook. Your standard natural monopoly is one which has high fixed costs and low marginal costs such that the first one to dominate the market can usually sustain that because their ongoing costs are low while any new entrant has to pay down the high fixed costs to enter the market. While usually associated with utilities, software matches that pretty well and software companies tend to be started by software engineers.
Writing software (the fixed cost) is extremely expensive as you need to pay a lot to get good engineers and you need a ton of them to handle the complexity associated with the largest markets but once you have written the software, it is relatively cheap to run (the marginal cost). Once one company starts dominating a software market, they can amortize the fixed costs across the greatest number of users and continuously invest to make their software continuously better such that it becomes almost impossible for a competitor to catch up.
You can see this today with the cloud as AWS rakes in billions in profits because they have the most features, biggest head start, and most IAAS revenue while the other companies lose billions (5.6 billion for google last year for example) trying to catch up.
Apparently it's not, see parent comment. Doubling-down and ignoring the criticism is downright dishonest.
Also: being a monopoly helps.
- Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0]
- Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
- Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me).
That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos