271–280 of 365 posts
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Yeah, this was Scott who creates comics (I forget the full name). His claim is that it's easier to be in the top 80% of two things rather than the top 90% of one thing.
You mean better than 99% of the population in two things together, rather than better than 90% in one. As in it's easier to be a top 1% percent programmer-laywer because there are so few of them, than it is to be a 10% lawyer or a top 10% programmer.
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…
However many if not all of these companies have gained most of their market value under the management of fairly ordinary business-type CEOs and management, who at best have some expertise in a technical field.
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> I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase Interestingly, you might be wrong. There's a continuing push to get people in the industry who can code for startups wanting to disrupt the space. You'd probably be the lawyer who can code and any lawyer-adjacent tech company would love you. Wh…
Absolutely, he probably would not be the right hire to squeeze an extra 0.1% of performance out of Google search, but on any team which has to understand the needs of the legal industry (plenty of these at FAANG and non-FAANG companies) he could find himself in a senior role very quickly.
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
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In Canada that "traditional" engineer is simply called "professional engineer", so it's a bit more grey. I do know some people who have the title software engineer and they had to do like a whole ceremony where they swore an oath and got a ring and stuff. They also have real-world legal rights and obligations that it grants them. For instance they can put their stamp on a structural drawing. Because they studied that…
The ring has nothing to do with whether you can call yourself an engineer. There's also no architecture requirements. What could can do as a professional engineer is stamp things if you think you're qualified and have followed a proper procedure for it. If a p eng thinks the architecture drawing is good, they can stamp it. If they think the line of code is nice, they can stamp it too
I'm a bit baffled on the fact that they can stamp things they aren't formally trained in. That's a surprise.
I had assumed they had some baseline level of training in different areas because a Software Engineer I know stamped an architecture drawing for a shed he was building. Granted a shed isn't a high risk building but still it's surprising he can do that if he's untrained.
Also does the ring really have nothing to do with it? My understanding is you earn the ring at the same time as the ability to call yourself a professional engineer. Maybe the ring itself isn't necessary but it's symbolically related for sure. Am I wrong?
Since most startups fail and the failure is usually due to lack of cashflow, startups that has the founder as a software engineer can have more bootstrap resources.
Which potentially increases the chance of these companies to cross the chasm.
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…
Have you seen Facebook's early code? It's very much "Early 2000s PHP spaghetti written by undergrad on a caffeine bender at 3 am". Facebook succeeded because of catching lightning in a bottle at the right place/time, and sure, later engineers built it to scale, but let's not kid ourselves that it was due to Zuck's coding genius.
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…
What is this bizarro world where Gates didn't do much coding but Zuckerberg bootstrapping a PHP CRUD app would get him in the door at today's Facebook?
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, partly coded a CRUD PHP app before moving on to executive stuff. He would probably not pass a Facebook interview without several years of intense preparation.
Brin and Page fall in between those two. They at least have several years of academic coding and their early Google work.
Yes, they're all very smart, but that's not enough to get into most FANG software engineering jobs.