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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?

#201

Post by tw04 »

Number157 wrote: post #85
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 "…

> 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…

>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.

And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.

>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 not the title.

Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.

>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.

I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.

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

#202

Post by Tycho »

I think software engineering gives people visceral feedback on principles/strategies that transfer well to other domains, but aren't as obvious to people in other domains. For instance: loose coupling, modularity, type checking, unit testing, avoiding side-effects, information hiding, readability, continuous integration, version control, service oriented architecture, reusability, many-eyes, (a)synchronicity, buffering, caching, portability, redundancy, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, avoiding premature optimization, rapid iteration, relational and object modeling, infosec, complexity analysis, scalability, technical debt.

And, of course, any modern organization is totally dependent on software in some way, so understanding this stuff is always going to be helpful for a CEO when making related hiring decisions and signing contracts.

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

#203

Post by IncRnd »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #176
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…

> 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…

> When we think "programming", we think FAANG

No, we do not.

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

#204

Post by whalesalad »

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…

If you think these guys couldn’t get a job as a software engineer you are deluding yourself.

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

#205

Post by IncRnd »

The title and what are shown in the article do not match. The headline shows, "...CEOs software engineer...," yet the article shows, "...founding CEOs software engineer..." This is a huge difference.

Half of the Founding CEOs shown are not actual software engineers but other types of engineers.

In the vein of the article, "Why do article writers make basic off-by-one errors, engage in clickbait, and treat logical fallacies as the truth?"

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

#206

Post by kyberias »

onion2k wrote: post #147
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…

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…

> 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.

What? Gates & Allen similarly wrote "a lot of early code". Gates also acted as a Chief Software Architect in his final days at Microsoft.

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

#208

Post by foepys »

whalesalad wrote: post #204
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…

If you think these guys couldn’t get a job as a software engineer you are deluding yourself.

At FAANG? Maybe, maybe not. Definitely not without studying first. Here is the example of Max Howell who wrote Homebrew and couldn't get past the whiteboard interview at Google.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

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

#209

Post by efficax »

GeneBond wrote: post #36
bawolff wrote: post #4

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…

The likely cause is that tech companies are the most recent space for capital innovation and profit, so have the hottest stocks right now

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

#210

Post by necovek »

kuu wrote: post #54
dogma1138 wrote: post #50

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

I am surprised you did not get that from mathematics, so I wonder what level/type of mathematics did you do?

I can get that you usually don't get it from regular high school mathematics, but even there one should learn to deal with proofs and deducing stuff in a precise, non-ambiguous way, and you have to pay attention to detail.

Coding allowed me to build things with my analytical mind liking precision and patterns, so it's the way for my "mathematical" brain to express creativity.

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