Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?

iism.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 365 posts

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

#151

Post by mettamage »

mrwoggle wrote: post #123
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.

They won't let you touch it. I've sent out more than 100 resumes and got in at only two despite having a bachelor + master in CS. The one company that I got in severely underpaid me. This is in NL and I might be an outlier, but I'm beginning to see a problem. I also applied (in secret) when I got the job, my odds didn't improve.

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

#152

Post by codegladiator »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #149
onion2k wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's /dont/ fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of /passing/ their own swe interviews...

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

#154

Post by vntok »

mettamage wrote: post #151
mrwoggle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They won't let you touch it. I've sent out more than 100 resumes and got in at only two despite having a bachelor + master in CS. The one company that I got in severely underpaid me. This is in NL and I might be an outlier, but I'm beginning to see a problem. I also applied (in secret) when I got the job, my odds didn't improve.

Most probably there's something else very wrong with your resume. The job being in high demand, your foot-in-the-door rate should be much higher.

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

#155

Post by pyrale »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #149
onion2k wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...

Maybe the issue is with the Google interview?

I mean, plenty of very capable people are filtered out of Google and go on to do great things. It is bound to happen when you receive hundreds of applications and hire one person.

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

#156

Post by batty_alex »

samatman wrote: post #105
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…

That seems overly reductive. Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers. It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science…

How about they study, or work in, the field in which they want to be CEO? Damn.

It’s not like history is some useless knowledge. Software engineering is still the new hotness. Give it time and the headline will change to why meteor engineers make the best CEOs while we all pine for the days we sat on top

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

#157

Post by onion2k »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #149
onion2k wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...

I am assuming a lot, but everything I've read about Larry, Sergey and Zuck tells me that they're pretty exceptional people (even if that doesn't extend to their coding ability, which I have no idea about). They're people who are driven, focused and hugely ambitious. If they don't have what it takes to pass a SWE interview then there's little hope for the rest of us.

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

#158

Post by crispyambulance »

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…

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

It depends on what you mean by "serious". Software development is very much a free-for-all as far as backgrounds go. It attracts people from all disciplines. There are NO CREDENTIALS needed to be called a "software engineer", and it will remain this way for the foreseeable future. Every organization that develops software has its own rules and standards for how they staff their teams, usually these rules are flexible to almost non-existent. They hire based on whether they think someone can do the work based on some loose evaluation criteria.

But, yeah, a mid-to-late career-changer with a successful business background as highly paid executive is going to raise eyebrows if they go after some software development job-- not because of technical chops (assuming they still got it), but more "wtf are you thinking?" considerations. These people would normally just self-fund their own software projects, or partner with someone in exchange for having some fund with code (it happens).

CEO demographics vary wildly. The article just cherry-picks the top ten market cap companies, which today, happen to dominated by software companies. Most of the CEO's have been SE's? So what? That means almost nothing. Are these 10 companies supposed to be profoundly representative of the world of work in some way?

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

#159

Post by k__ »

I saw what engineers were hired by people who didn't have the slightest idea about tech.

They got fooled quite often. Not on purpose, the engs they hired didn't know any better.

This was also true for technical people who would hire outside their domain. Hardware people hiring web devs were also fooled often.

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

#160

Post by tinco »

onion2k wrote: post #157
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...

I am assuming a lot, but everything I've read about Larry, Sergey and Zuck tells me that they're pretty exceptional people (even if that doesn't extend to their coding ability, which I have no idea about). They're people who are driven, focused and hugely ambitious. If they don't have what it takes to pass a SWE interview then there's little hope for the rest of us.

I think the point is, that even if they are intelligent and capable and definitely contributed a lot to their initial codebases ( I don't know why you singled out Gates, but he most certainly did as well), all of these companies grew to the point where almost any code change requires a bunch of expertise with technologies that they probably have not been exposed to.

I don't know if they wouldn't get hired, I mean it's not like those companies never hire straight out of college, they obviously do, so expertise is not an absolute requirement. But they probably couldn't be hired as drop-in experienced SE's. Half their tech stacks are on technology that didn't even exist when they last touched code.

All of these CEO's are famous for their excellent early talent acquisition of software engineers. Microsoft and Apple for leveraging those engineers to initiate a new digital world, and Facebook and Google for attracting (and motivating) the worlds best to achieve global domination.

Post reply on HN