141–150 of 365 posts
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…
change good to successful
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wozniak was not a software engineer either; he was an EE
As were most software engineers in those days? It would be a while before CS and specific software software related fields of study took off
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 there is no c-suite.stackexchange.com for them to cut-and-paste their corporate directives from.
Well... if you're running a tech company, you need a CEO who understands tech. Why is that such a surprise?
There's the idea that CEO should be a 'business person', and technical people are cogs in the machine.
That being said, many companies have hierarchies of clueless managers between the CEO and the engineering team. Having someone at the helm who understands the good-fast-cheap triangle [1] in tech driven companies is from my point of view a good thing.
This doesn't imply that every software engineer can be a CEO. It requires a lot of other (soft) skills to do this job.
[1] https://www.explanimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/go...
In a world of literacy, you are a fool to hire an illiterate person as a CEO. So we start to see the shakeout.
Look, in early Medieval Europe, Charlemagne could only write his name, and was functionlly illiterate for much of his life. But every Holy Roman Emperor afterwards was a as literate as you or I.
We are at that hand over stage now - every CEO in the previous generation could get away with being Charlegmane. Not any more
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…
There are 10 CEO level people mentioned.
Woz could certainly get a job at Apple. He's clearly brilliant and capable.
Larry & Sergey could definitely get jobs at Google. They were PhD CS students at Stanford (how on Earth is that "unqualified" to you?).
Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code.
Gates & Allen allegedly didn't do much actual coding themselves but they certainly understood it. I imagine Jobs, Bezos and Jack Ma also understood coding even if they didn't do any themselves. I don't know anything about Ma Huateng.
I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff. Code isn't that hard that you need to be a special snowflake to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what would that be exactly?
For me it's at least the following: - 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
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…
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. There are 10 CEO level people mentioned. Woz could certainly get a job at Apple. He's clearly brilliant and capable. Larry & Sergey could definitely get jobs at Google. They were PhD CS students at Stanford (how on Earth is that "unqualified" to you?). Zuckerberg could get a j…
Describing Larry, Sergey, and Zuck as software engineers is a bit generous, as I'm sure they'd be the first to admit :)
