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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?

#121

Post by g051051 »

According to the last company I worked at, software engineers can do everyone else's jobs when things get behind. PO busy? Work with the customer to get requirements, then write stories and tickets. QA running behind? Developers can do the testing. Need to hire more people and the manager doesn't have time? Have the devs do all the interviews. Need more ops staff? Call it DevOps and put the devs on call.

So clearly software engineers are the smartest people in any organization. No wonder they become CEOs!

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

#122

Post by erhk »

533474 wrote: post #95
Number157 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google/Alphabet's current CEO 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 n…

Wozniak was not a software engineer either; he was an EE

Similarly not a single person graduated in deep learning 2000-2010

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

#123

Post by mrwoggle »

isamuel wrote: post #109

All of the people on this list are "software engineers" in the sense that they have some rudimentary education in the field. Almost none of them could get a job as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified. And I'm not looking down my nose at anyone: I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is no…

> and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase.

If you have already a CS degree and you spend a couple months refreshing your memory, you would be amazed what codebases you can touch.

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

#124

Post by harlanji »

isamuel wrote: post #109

All of the people on this list are "software engineers" in the sense that they have some rudimentary education in the field. Almost none of them could get a job as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified. And I'm not looking down my nose at anyone: I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is no…

You can call yourself a developer if you do a startup. I distunguish SEs based on how deep they go. Developers can throw up a house in the suburbs. An engineer might be needed to extract water or something specific. CS is a good qualifer for an engineer, while a developer can be the neighbor kid.

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

#125

Post by marcus_holmes »

arethuza wrote: post #82
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.

"Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer." 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).

My view as a developer with an MBA is that I got it because the hardest problems I was facing were people/political/business problems rather than tech problems.

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.

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

#126

Post by marcus_holmes »

GeneBond wrote: post #56
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 "…

Hi, I'm the original author. The point of the article is as follows: there is clearly a trend towards top market-cap companies being founded by software engineering CEOs, but why? The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. I believe there are two reasons: 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, M…

Were the railway industrialists all railway engineers?

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

#129

Post by mordae »

Ensorceled wrote: post #104
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I mean they're all CEO's, they don't do software engineering as far as I know. Maybe they once did, 15-20 years ago, and maybe that was their major in uni, but I think it's a bad trend to put a label on people based on what they went to school for. What you pick in school is not your life, and real life / work experience is more educational than the education system (in my experience, but then, I'm college level…

I'm pushing 60 and university is STILL one of the most formative events, if not the most formative event, in my lifetime.

Anything you do in your twenties ends up being the most formative in general.
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