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Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

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Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#11

Post by xmprt »

anxrn wrote: post #9
sebmellen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing. [0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's persona…

Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this. > *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

Did Wozniak ever hold the title of CEO?

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#12

Post by sebmellen »

anxrn wrote: post #9
sebmellen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing. [0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's persona…

Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this. > *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

Yes, I did, which is why I find it so disingenuous. I mean, looking at their chart, 7/10 do not have software engineer CEOs. And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple.

"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).

--

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.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#13

Post by replyifuagree »

sebmellen wrote: post #5

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - 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 "…

Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well.

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.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#15

Post by redis_mlc »

replyifuagree wrote: post #13
sebmellen wrote: post #5

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - 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 "…

Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well. 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…

> Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise.

Well, Sergey and Larry failed in writing their initial crawler in C (they even published a paper on how not to write a crawler in C), so paid a programmer to write it in python. I believe he became employee #1.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#16

Post by sebmellen »

replyifuagree wrote: post #13
sebmellen wrote: post #5

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - 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 "…

Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well. 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…

Then they should revise the title to "Software engineers make the best founders."

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.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#17

Post by selcuka »

anaganisk wrote: post #14

Umm, if the product is software the domain expertise helps for that, but im not sure how companies like Shell or United Airlines benifit from a software CEO.

To be fair they listed the first 10 companies by market cap. It's not their fault neither Shell nor United Airlines made it to the top 10.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#18

Post by ZephyrBlu »

anonytrary wrote: post #10

Intelligent people make the best CEOs. Software engineers are probably more intelligent, on average, than others. I think it might be better to look at IQ+EQ and see if there's a correlation there instead (although that data is probably not feasible to obtain).

Software Engineers are probably more intelligent than people from other engineering disciplines, or people in general?

If other engineering disciplines, it seems a bit pretentious.

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#19

Post by solumos »

sebmellen wrote: post #5

Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous? - 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 "…

Definitely. I'd be interested to see how this breaks down for the S&P 500, with more rigor around what constitutes an engineer - maybe have different categories?

Re: Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

#20

Post by mav3rick »

sebmellen wrote: post #8
anxrn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer. From the article [1] you linked, "He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering". Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.

Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing. [0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's persona…

I think cracking the JEE at that time was clearly correlated to him being smart. He was obviously going to be successful wherever he went.
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