131–140 of 365 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm also not sure many of the others qualify either, were Sergey and Larry "good CEOs"?
As others have noted, the correlation between developer CEOs and success is that many of the most successful companies today are software companies. Is there even a single large non-tech company with a developer as CEO?
If anything I would assume developers are substantially worse than average as CEOs, from lacking interpersonal skills to exaggerated focus on details.
Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. I'm also not sure many of the others qualify either, were Sergey and Larry "good CEOs"? As others have noted, the correlation between developer CEOs and success is that many of the most successful companies today are software companies. Is there even a single large non-tech company with a developer as CEO? If anyt…
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.
Maybe they turn into the engineer who can extract water, if only for reasons of path-dependency. And in a world where water-extraction is a valuable industry, that path-dependent contingency will result in them maybe starting a valuable water-extraction engineering firm. But it's not that nailing up drywall as a kid made them uniquely qualified. It's that they were industrious and smart and had sufficient fortune and whatever else. Which is good, all that stuff is good.
Apple of course shouldn't be in this list at all, Wozniak was never a CEO and I'm sure he'd be terrible. I'm also not sure many of the others qualify either, were Sergey and Larry "good CEOs"? As others have noted, the correlation between developer CEOs and success is that many of the most successful companies today are software companies. Is there even a single large non-tech company with a developer as CEO? If anyt…
Wozniak is many great things, but sadly yes he probably would have been:
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 "…
Wow, talk about assuming correlation implies causation. I think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.
I'm the author bawolff, and I completely agree that the success of software engineers as CEOs is correlation, not causation. The likely cause is that software engineers learn to discover value by running value experiments. Zuckerberg and Bezos are well known for their value experiments in production. I believe that the nature of pursuing new value, in effect, taught them this practice. And to the comment below, when…
> Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value
So is literally everything.
Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest
Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease.
Etc
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…
Because programming is too much fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, t…
> And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple. In terms of title? No. In terms of function? Well sure, he's a co-founder.
What this seems to show is that CEOs in a particular sector often have expertise in that sector. And that Tech is currently the most highly valued sector as measured by market capitalisation. To find evidence of Software Engineers being the best CEOs overall you'd really need to find examples of them running non-tech firms successfully or examples of non-Software Engineers running tech firms poorly.
I'm the original author, and I certainly believe that there are all kinds of great CEOs. What I am saying in this article is that software engineering CEOs are breaking out due to the super-infrastructure that is software, and that guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are using software to speed the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68