Why engineers make great CEOs

Engineer-turned-CEO here.

Engineering teaches you a lot of the analytical / architecture skills you need to build and run organizations, but you won't be ready to lead until you learn a decent amount of the other business functions that make up just about every company.

You need to learn how marketing works, but not just the basics - learn what type of people are good at each role, what are the types of roles you need for different types of marketing strategies, some of the tactics for each strategy, etc...

Rinse and repeat for sales, operations, finance, product (different from, but aligned with engineering), and general strategic stuff like legal, recruiting, release strategy, fund raising, investor management, and so on.

Here's the good news: you don't need to be an expert in all of these areas when you get started. You just need to know enough to know which questions to ask and then surround yourself with advisors who can help answer them.

If you've ever built a new product (doesn't literally need to be a commercial product) from scratch and actually gotten people to use it, then you're probably already capable of thinking strategically - that's the first core ingredient for dealing with the market / product / economic challenges tasked to CEOs.

The second ingredient is the empathy and people-management part... This means being able to internalize concepts like e every employee is different, values different things, and therefore might need / expect different things from you - some employees might deeply care about working on interesting projects; others might care about being able to work in a specific time / location so they can maximize the time they spend with their family; some might care about money; but in my experience overwhelmingly most employees just care about feeling like their work is meaningful and appreciated.

Learning how to build an organization out of people who all have different personal priorities, levels of experience, backgrounds, and personalities is not trivial. You basically need to develop a high degree of self-awareness about your own needs and values as an employee first. And once you're able to do that, it gets a lot easier to recognize and understand what others need.

TL;DR; - there's a big menagerie of different things you have to learn to be a CEO, and engineering can help you structure the process of learning them but it's not enough unto itself. Develop a strong sense of self-awareness, a good advisory board, and the humility to ask for help when you need it.

I was with you until the last sentence. Great CEOs may not be found on every street corner, but there are a lot more of them in the world than two.

My sister's a petroleum geologist. She's said that there's a big supply/demand imbalance for geologists in the oil industry - universities will graduate only about 1/3 as many geologists as the industry needs over the next 10 years. Geology's one of the least popular of the STEM majors, and among geology college students, the oil & mining industries are often seen as "selling out to the man", since many geologists also tend to be environmentalists and the oil industry is...well, not.

She's perpetually overworked as well, which squares with a supply/demand imbalance. You'd think that this'd just lead to higher salaries - and by her accounts, her employer basically does throw money at her - but the fact that petroleum geologists are paid pretty well hasn't yet filtered down to university students choosing their majors.

There certainly is a big supply/demand imbalance, but undergrad geology enrollments are actually way up. All geoscience departments I know have have dramatically increased in size in the past 10 years or so. (e.g. where I went to undergrad has gone from 5 geo majors to ~60, and I've seen the same at the two places I went to grad school)

A lot of it is that a geoscience job at an oil company requires an M.S. or a Ph.D., and geology degrees typically take longer than most other fields. There's a minimum of a 6-year lag between starting undergrad and being eligible for a job. Typically it's more like 7-8 years total for an M.S. and 8-12 years for a Ph.D.

Therefore, it's a long pipeline. I just started in industry, and when I switched to geology in undergrad (early 00's), oil companies were not hiring geologists and hadn't been for 15 years.

The stigma associated with going into the oil industry depends a lot on where you are geographically. If you go to an "oil patch" school, then it's the opposite effect. It is a factor, but I'd argue the field vs. desk job part has a larger influence.

Geologists tend to become geologists because they _really_ like the outdoors. With a few exceptions, as a petroleum geologist, you're behind a desk 100% of the time. Compare that to fields like environmental consulting or state government work where you can start right out of undergrad and are in the field a significant portion of the time. (Both of those pay less and tend to involve less actual geology, though.)

Finally, there's a risk/reward trade-off. Geologists tend to be among the first to go when layoffs start. We're concentrated in exploration and development (note: field development, not software), and exploration is viewed as an expense, not a profit center. Exploration budgets get slashed the second things look like they're going to take a downturn, and smaller companies lay off most of their exploration geologists whenever oil prices drop. Development is the second thing to cut back on after exploration. A lot of the folks that I got my M.S. with started jobs in '06 or '07 and were laid off in '08 or '09. They've all since found jobs again, but the cycle will repeat itself.