"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.
> *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