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 not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. But if I started a really valuable company tomorrow (maybe I should), I would code as a software engineer on this list.
I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not?
> 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.
When we think "programming", we think FAANG but in the real world, there are thousands of places that need basic code slung.
> You'd probably be the lawyer who can code and any lawyer-adjacent tech company would love you.
As a lawyer who can code (years of experience as a professional software developer and years of experience as a practicing attorney) let me assure you, this is not the case. There just isn’t that much overlap, despite the common wisdom that such a thing should exist, it’s very hard to actually find.
Also, not everything outside of faang is ‘basic code’ - there’s a whole wide world out there!
I don't remember where I read this (possibly even on HN at some point), but this reminds me of an interesting idea that has stuck with me over time...
Consider two broad but otherwise generally viewed as unrelated (however, not mutually exclusive) skillsets: A and B. Lots of people are great at A and lots of people are great at B, but the intersection of the two is generally small (perhaps "law" and "programming" could be reasonably argued as examples of A and B here). There are large numbers of people employed doing A, and similarly for B, often quite successfully in both cases.
Now, there's some much smaller set of individuals who have a reasonable grasp of both skillsets A and B. Recall that they're not mutually exclusive (are any skillsets, really?), just not often seen together. It seems that this set of people would be uniquely positioned to potentially provide immense value over the perhaps small (but even more marginally serviced) field of needs where A and B intersect. The value here isn't in the individual's capability for A or B in isolation, but in what they can provide where A and B cross.
I realise the above is a big generalization and perhaps hugely oversimplified, but it's interesting to think about the different, seemingly unrelated skillsets where there may be great potential from some cross-pollination of ideas to bear new fruit. I do think that "programming" in general, perhaps in some form not as it's conventionally understood today, is becoming somewhat of a new literacy, at least to the extent that there seem to be countless existing businesses or fields of inquiry that could benefit from programmers who are also experts in their traditional domains. However, one could also come up with lots of different examples for A and B above, which may not even include programming at all.
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.
Basically summarizes the nugget of advice my advisor gave me in college: if you want to be incredibly valuable, bridge two or more often disjoint in-demand skillsets. It's served me well throughout my career so far. I'm definitely not the best software engineer nor am I the best at the other fields I bridge but I often not only see the connections those more skilled on both sides often miss and new opportunities, I have enough skill in both domains to bridge them and create at least a proof-of-concept. At some point the experts in both domains take over once I build the bridge and I actively work to help build something less like a wooden bridge and something with more concrete and steel, usually with more people involved...
I think in software (and CS in general) this advice is especially valuable because software and computing is the glue that can connect and materialize ideas into something that seems tangible. It's also something that's often approachable by an individual and doesn't always require a mountain of capital to achieve.
Techcrunch called it the dual PhD problem. One example is if you understand the traditional finance, you'll have an easier time when building a DeFi application on top of Ethereum.
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.
Yeah no shortage of Legal Discovery startups. Plus plenty of use for a lawyer-with-tech-skills when it comes to things like intellectual property laws, or just having someone who knows how to use Legal Hold software effectively.
Isn't the 'senior role' aligned with what he said though? He'd have the industry insight to design product roadmaps and UX wire frames in a PM type role, but wouldn't touch the codebase because he's a lawyer who wrote some code a long time ago, not a lawyer who codes, and the non-lawyers his team can hire have much more experience in actual software engineering.
The silos that individual contributors perceive tend to disintegrate as you move up the chain. If you're the GM of some product at a FAANG that has exposure to the legal industry, what you often find is there are tons of great developers you can hire internally, but not many people who have expertise in that vertical and can also be dangerous around the code. If a lawyer with a CS degree and a bit of coding background wanted to cross over and join your dev org you'd probably be happy to open whatever doors they need.
> You'd probably be the lawyer who can code and any lawyer-adjacent tech company would love you.
Being able to natively express and review logic related to some legal software would be useful indeed, but honestly your team will need someone good at gathering requirements from non-technical folks either way and my guess would be that a lawyer that can vaguely code would likely be retained as an expert in the field but offered compensation like an entry-level to mid- developer by a startup.
I think that SMEs are great to have on the team, and I'd happily jump at the chance to contract with one that's got some vague coding experience as well - but I'd contract that out to pick their brains specifically on their specialty rather than try and shoe-horn them into a dev role. If I found a lawyer that had returned to development full time that's a different jazz - but you also need to keep in mind if the now-lawyer that used to be a developer actually wants to go back to full time development.
> There's a continuing push to get people in the industry who can code for startups wanting to disrupt the space.
In my experience disrupting spaces it's easier to find software engineers that are open minded when working with other professionals. Not like, super easy, most of the SWEs I've worked with can't do it, even on embedded when working with EEs... but open minded SWEs are out there, albeit usually more expensive or with good pay and job security by working on a less-softwarey company than "Big Tech".
> ... there are thousands of places that need basic code slung.
Not just "basic code". There are thousands of companies doing just as challenging work than FAANGs do. There's innovation happening all over the place.
Of course since most Startups are using the Leetcode/FAANG style interview loop the OP probably wouldn't stand a chance of passing without months of study.
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 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.
> He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code.
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.
> 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.
My understanding is that the last application code Gates was involved in was the TRS-80 Model 100 [1] circa 1982; I taught my kids assembly on the Model 100 and think it's great.
Allen and gates where writing code when they were in highschool when no one was writing code. They also also got 1590 and 1600 on theirs sats when it used to be super hard. These are super smart and motivated people. You don't they could master leetcode after a few weeks of practice?
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 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.
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.
If this is the standard that "they couldn't get hired TODAY" I'm sure that's not a very interesting fact worth discussing.
I mean if we reanimated Big Al Einstein today and he had a blind interview for a tenure track physics position at Princeton Physics dept he would probably fail. The field has changed too much although with months of prep he'd be able to catch up, the same as L & S could for SWE interviews.
But they probably couldn't be hired as drop-in experienced SE's.
That's exactly what I said in my first post - "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."
What? You honestly think the Stanford PhDs who created Google couldn't get hired as basic SWEs? Seriously? I mean if true that says a lot more about the SWE interviews than it does about Stanford PhDs.
I mean there are Yale JDs that fail the bar exam but no one would claim that the average Yale JD couldn't get hired as a Big Law associate or judicial clerk.
In a very literal sense, that's exactly what's broken about the interview process in the software industry. The philosophy is to avoid false positives at all costs, so a high rate of false negatives is seen as OK. The prevailing advice is, just try your luck again in six months.
That's the good thing about Bitcoin. I don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. It doesn't matter where you work if you convert your fiat to the superior store of value
> You honestly think the Stanford PhDs who created Google couldn't get hired as basic SWEs? Seriously?
They would definitely get a phone screen based on their resumes, but there is a good chance they wouldn't even make it to the virtual onsite round. It's not like the interviewers would use their products or look at their code or dissertation or whatever.
Google famously refused to hire Max Howell, the programmer who wrote Homebrew, which (based on Google's own statements) was used by 90% of Google's engineers at the time of his interview, because he couldn't invert a binary tree in the specific (but unstated) manner that the interviewer wanted. So it's definitely possible, indeed likely, that Serge and Larry wouldn't get hired at the Google of today.
The "average Yale JD" would not get hired as a judicial clerk. Competition for clerkships is fierce, and generally only the top students get them. Any judge would probably take a "top" Yale JD, but unless the judge is a Yale graduate they'll all pass on the "average Yale JD," in favor of a better-performing graduate from another law school (usually their own).
I don't know how true the % is, but that is what Howell claimed and several Google employees verified that his software was used by significant parts of Google's engineering staff.
At any rate, the point is that a guy who used software used by a large portion of Google's engineering team because it was superior to the in-house solution could not get a job at Google because he failed to answer a programming question in the specific manner the interviewer wanted for a type of problem he would never actually encounter on the job. And in that vein, Sergie and Larry would similarly have difficulty getting hired at Google because other than their original algorithm, which Google has not used in over a decade, they have no modern or recent software experience and would likely fail all of the programming interviews.
I have never worked at Google, but around 2015 everyone I knew working there was using Homebrew if they used Mac for development. Moreover, there were quite a bit of HN and Reddit discussion about this incident at the time, and a number of Google engineers confirmed that Homebrew was in widespread use among the Mac-based developers.
I have no idea how great a developer Howell is, but it's simply not true that Homebrew was used by many Google employees. I was at Google at that time (2015), had a macbook for several years, and had never even heard of Homebrew.
Google is a linux shop, and you were generally not allowed to even keep the source code in your notebook.
Either in a desktop sitting securely under your desk at office, or "in the cloud". You would remotely connect to them to do your development. (Most of Google binaries I saw were way too heavy to run on a Macbook, anyway.) Macbooks were just for checking email, calendar, or similar stuff.
> At any rate, the point is that a guy who used software used by a large portion of Google's engineering team because it was superior to the in-house solution
Do you seriously believe that they couldn't come up with something better than mediocre package manager?
Based on Google's track record the past few years, Yes, I seriously believe that Google could not come up with a better package manager. They've taken 6 shots at a basic messaging application and they still haven't gotten that right. 4 attempts at a payment application. Stadia. Wear. Nest (post-acquistion). The had 1 shot with Stadia to do it right and they fucked it up so badly that it's impacting Google's ability to sell other services to prospective business partners because prospective clients rightly doubt Google's ability to launch and maintain a product.
The real question is: knowing Google's track record of almost complete failure for the past few years, why would you believe in Google?
Based on the bugginess of Maps, Duo, Hangouts, Wear, Stadia, and other products, I would say that the poor engineering is almost as much a factor of these failures as the lack of business vision. After all, the product doesn't need to work well for the PM to get promoted. It just needs to exist.
Google is run by the engineers. You don't get to blame the MBAs for its failures.
All code at google is built from source from a single mono repo with a one version rule. Approximately zero googlers use homebrew since almost no development is done on macs and there is no need for packages management.
I literally mean there is a good chance they'd fail. Is it 30%? 60%? I'm not sure, but it's not as low as you might expect.
Many stanford phds fail the interview process. I'm not speculating. Others have suggested this says more about the interview process than the person in question. They might be right. But here we are.
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...
You might be semi joking, so apologies if I took it too literally: I'm assuming nothing really. And we are saying almost the exact same thing. Many pass, many fail. Pretty good chance of succeeding, pretty good chance of failing.
The dirty truth is that most whiteboard industries are heavily loaded on raw cognitive ability. Sure, it’s ostensibly about data structures, but what it’s really about is fluid intelligence. Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry, Sergey and Bezos all have extremely high intelligence, and would most likely pass with ease.
I agree with you, and I think that this "dirty turth" is unpopular, because lots of people want to feel bright and intelligent, but the algorithm interviews, when interpreted in this way, tells them they're not that super bright -- and they don't like that, so they want to interpret the interviews in other ways, eg it's just luck, or anyone can do it with enough practice or things like that.
At the same time, I think the coding interviews generally are harder than what's needed to do the job well, just because there're so many job applicants so the bar gets unnecessarily high? And people who fail the interviews can still be really bright. (Also, some people get nervous and fail mostly related to that. I wonder how to avoid that happening)
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?
Agreed, Gates was a brilliant coder for any other faults. He'd probably need to catch up on tech, but could easily then get a very senior engineering job at Microsoft or anywhere else, if he managed to escape the ageism trap.
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.
Not to be "that guy", but he'd have to get past the HR filter first and if I remember correctly, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Without a college degree, it's very difficult to get past the HR filter in and of itself to even get to the interview to solve those problems.
Underlining this point. The claim isn't that they couldn't work in the field. It is that they could have trouble in the interview.
I'm not clear why/if this is controversial. I thought it was well established that interviews are tough from both ends and that they suffer heavily from Goodhart's law.
Zuck wouldn’t. He’s a Mediocre engineer by his own admission. It’s a myth that he was an autistic genius. The engineering questions at fb aren’t trivial.
I'm not an expert, but my feeling is you'd need just three things to get back into Big Tech:
1) At least a year or two of experience at another programming job,
2) MONTHS of time studying whiteboarding, and maybe
3) A few good referrals.
I know, because I'm 34 and I have 9 years of enterprise experience. I'm trying to get into Big Tech right now (I've interviewed with Google and Amazon and I'm about to do Facebook). I'm lucky though that I have an undergrad science degree from Stanford, so I have at least some credibility in that world and many of my former peers are in that space.
The only really hard part is finding the will to study leetcode problems for hours.
I have all sorts of thoughts on the subconscious motivations behind the whiteboard grind. It's sort of a hazing ritual. Or, like so many things in America, a class filter initially designed to not be a class filter: rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't.
But ultimately, it's helpful to think of it as a game. Either play it or don't. There's no point in trying to resist it if my goal is ultimately to succeed personally. I keep getting rejected from Big Tech, but local firms are THROWING job offers at me just for being a decent, experienced programmer. I don't have much to complain about, other than the fact that I'd sort of like to make $400k for a little while and then drop out of society for a year or two.
And I think the large majority of people realize leetcode != software engineering ability. They're just trading off a low false positive rate for a high false negative rate. My wife has also been spending months studying for the LSAT. It's really quite similar except I can work as programmer without formal credentials.
> a class filter initially designed to not be a class filter: rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't.
I think whiteboarding problems can be silly but....
If you are applying to these jobs you either just graduated, in which case you just spent 4 years finding time to jump through all the hoops the professors gave you, surely you can find another 3 months to become an expert on whiteboarding problems.
Or you're a professional software developer. And the number of professional software developers who are good enough to work at Google or Amazon, live in the U.S. and are "poor" is a vanishingly small number.
Get as much experience in dev as you can. But don't feel like you have to have X years of experience to make it.
Studying algorithms is HUGELY IMPORTANT. They say they "just want to see how you think." That's a lie. Big Tech interviews are like a whiteboarding final exam, and you need to shoot for an A.
Study leetcode. Study resources like interviewcake.com or Cracking the Coding Interview, and take practice interviews at interviewing.io.
>rich people can afford to study for months for free. Poor people can't.
No offense but I laugh at this thought. Because most people don't realize what they are actually capable of-- they'd rather make excuses.
Excuses are easier to make than to sit down, intensely study, and build projects, in a public library, while living in a tent.
And, I think a lot of people in the "special snowflake" mentality are afraid to recognize that a lot of poor people choose to be poor-- and even glorify it: much like the "gloating over/glorifying victimhood" movement.
As someone who has spent almost a year living in a tent while studying technology, I beg to differ.
I studied for free for several months, a few times, while living in a tent & in a cabin without running water/electricity. It simply requires a strategy to find: internet access, free food, low cost showers, relatively safe tent space near a town/city, etc.
About 8 years ago I stopped working in entry level Marketing ($14/hr) to live in a tent (so as not to have to pay rent) and learn web design. It helped my get my first jobs.
It's a long story-- after a few months, went back to work in digital marketing. Later, lived in a tent again to study web app dev. After dropping out of grad school (lived off loans while living in shack without water & electricity), lived in relative's living room in SF Bay area for 1-2 months while applying to jobs, and landed first programming job.
There's nothing wrong with living in a tent, on a couch, etc-- whether rich or poor.
Living poor didn't stop me-- the willpower to put in the work to actively learn (actively i.e. keeping journals of notes & building projects) is more important than having a place to live.
Anyone can live in a tent and eat food from a food bank for a few months, and shower at a community center, while learning. (Assuming they don't have kids to take care of. If they have kids before getting their career skills together, well... that's just poor planning)
Strategies involved: Motivational thinking. Motivational music. Cultivating positive thought processes. A strong belief in the economics data (bureau of labor statistics). And a strong belief that studying web dev will result in a job, assuming a person is organized, studies, and creates a relevant portfolio with projects.
__________
Note: I have relatives who are currently quite poor, and have been as long as I've known them.
Their problem as I see it?
They refer to themselves as "Poor people" instead of "People who refuse to apply to jobs" or "People who refuse to research economically relevant skills and then build said skills in an organized manner".
The reality is that being poor or not poor IS in their control. And they choose to be poor. Why? Because they choose not to do the alternative: work towards a strategy resulting in not being poor.
I've counseled a cousin who is about my age. He prefers to wake up in the evening, smoke cannabis, stay up all night, and occasionally work manual labor jobs during the day. At age 30-ish. Yet is intelligent. Just chooses to prioritize instant gratification.
Obviously, none of this is black and white. It's definitely possible for the less well-off to devote resources to passing meritocracy tests. It's just harder.
It's not either or: 1) people should take more accountability for their own lives, but at the same time, 2) it should be easier to raise yourself up if you're less fortunate.
If you're willing to overcome the obstacles you can accomplish nearly anything. I'm just in favor of fewer obstacles.
> 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?
Likely the company wants to use the same language in US as well as in Canada. Noone I know in Canada is called Software Engineer, we all refer to ourselves as Software Developer.
FWIW the UK has a similar thing for traditional Engineer roles. Nobody is legally permitted to call themselves a "tradtional" Engineer (such as Civil, Aerospace, Aeronautical, etc.) without, typically, at minimum a bachelor's degree or equivalent vocational training in that discipline. These are deemed "protected" roles but they are very specific - i.e. there needs to be some kind of auhtoritative body that wards the title(s). "Software Engineer" has no such protection. Generic/non-descript "Engineer" isn't protected. There are plenty of "Software Engineer" roles and it's entirely feasible to be hired as a SWE before you even get any higher education at all. Most of my previous roles have officially been documented as "(Junior/Senior/Lead/etc) Software Engineer" on my contract(s) of employment.
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 stuff.
It does seem silly to have real-world building architecture requirements for a Software Engineer but that's where we're at.
Anyways, Software Developer (or even "Product Developer") is a much more common term in Canada as a result. No one wants to tangle with provincial regulations over a job title.
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 admit I don't know much about it, because I'm not one.
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?
> I’m a ‘Software engineer’ in Canada. Have been at multiple companies. Do not have an engineering degree...
I'm mixing between EGBC (Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia) and PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) in links below, but feel free to contact your local engineering licensing body to check if your titles hold up. There is a bunch of weird language through out. Who knows, you may qualify.
From [1]: "In British Columbia, anyone who practises software engineering, or who uses the title “software engineer” (or a similar title that implies that they are a software engineer, like “firmware engineer”, “mobile app engineer”, etc.), must be registered with Engineers and Geoscientists BC."
There is a lot more in [1] including, "Not all software development constitutes software engineering." and "... many individuals who develop software probably do not actually engage in software engineering..."
Someone linked to a Microsoft job using the word engineer in Canada, which seems strange since Microsoft already learned about the protected use of the word "engineer" in Canada in 2001 [2].
Professional Engineers Ontario says, "On July 25, 2002 Microsoft Canada announced that they will continue to use the term 'engineer' as part of the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) designation."[3]
> Professional Engineer is a protected title in Canada. Is that what you’re thinking of?
I think "engineer" is protected too. I think job titles that contain "engineer" can only be used by those who are registered professional engineers.
From [4], "Can someone call themselves an Engineer/Professional Engineer or P.Eng if they don’t have a licence?
The term Engineer/Professional Engineer/P.Eng. can only be used by those that have been granted a licence by PEO, under the authority of the Professional Engineers Act. The title “Engineer” is restricted to Ontario licence holders under s. 40(2)(a.1) of the Act."
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.
This is reflective of the different roles for founders vs. software engineers, though. A technical founder's job is to show that a new software-based way of doing things is worth doing. A software engineer's job is to do it well.
A necessary precondition for showing that something new & innovative is worth doing is usually to do it. It's not a sufficient condition though: you also need the risk tolerance to work on things new & innovative that may not work; you need the deep understanding of your problem to understand what the solution looks like; you need the location & social connections to access capital and hire real software engineers to scale your solution; and you need the judgment to hire the right people to fill in your skillset gaps. That's why most software engineers aren't off founding billion dollar companies.
Note that this applies to other founder-led enterprises. Fred Koch was a hell of a chemist before Koch Industries became a huge conglomerate. Warren Buffett studied under one of the greatest value investors (Benjamin Graham) on Wall Street. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and railroad superintendent before becoming a steel magnate. You need that operational experience and domain knowledge before founding a world-changing company.
>> I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs?
Mick Napier who founded and runs The Annoyance where many famous comedians studied over the years, comedians who Second City would claim as graduates of their program like Tina Fey and Chris Farley, said they he doesn't like clamming taking the credit for successful graduates unless he also takes the credit for all the unsuccessful.
> Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs?
Because there are many more software engineering jobs in the world than CEO jobs.
> 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.
Which probably reflects more that the hiring process is broken, than that these people couldn't contribute to a business writing code.
The real problem is that, in addition to writing code, they would also start identifying business opportunities and new ways to improve processes and increase revenues and cut costs, threatening the perceived job security of the people in management above them.
The top 5 entries on this list were all from founders who wrote a significant portion of their companies original code. Granted, Larry and Sergei maybe aren't able to code to the Google standard anymore - but they once did.
I don't see why it would be surprising that tech companies benefit from technical founders. When I see MBA/finance run companies my first thought is that they are almost certainly a finance, contracting, or marketing business even if on the outside they are a consumer product, mining, or manufacturing firm.
Many mature businesses benefit from a financial viewpoint as CEO as there are no major innovations or risks to be done that can't be reasoned about on a spreadsheet. Tech has been on the other end of that spectrum for the last few decades.
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.
I had the privilege of working under a CTO, who would personally write code for me when I got stuck. A big part of this was it was a smaller company, but even so I definitely think Hands-On founders make the best founders.
Because you can essentially hop in and fix something, even if your other engineers are but stuck. Plus knowing that you can personally increase your wealth by 6 million dollars with a couple of good lines of code doesn't hurt.
You can call yourself a developer if you do a startup. I distunguish SEs based on how deep they go. Developers can throw up a house in the suburbs. An engineer might be needed to extract water or something specific. CS is a good qualifer for an engineer, while a developer can be the neighbor kid.
This is a better way of putting the point I was inelegantly grasping at. The neighbor kid is just an industrious kid---they happen to be nailing up drywall, but it's not that nailing up the drywall is why they end up running Berkshire Hathaway (or whatever) later. It's that they're industrious, and have various other traits that---in some other context---would result in them doing whatever else.
Maybe they turn into the engineer who can extract water, if only for reasons of path-dependency. And in a world where water-extraction is a valuable industry, that path-dependent contingency will result in them maybe starting a valuable water-extraction engineering firm. But it's not that nailing up drywall as a kid made them uniquely qualified. It's that they were industrious and smart and had sufficient fortune and whatever else. Which is good, all that stuff is good.
You can do both. Usually, nails go along the outside and screws in the "field," but I'll confess that it's been 30 years since I helped my dad do it (I was a big help, I'm sure) so perhaps the state of the art has changed.
we used ring nails to shoot the subfloor onto the joices. and put down subfloor adhesive. we used nails because they were quick. screws would be better yes.
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.
So true! Around 1980, chemical and petroleum engineers made the best CEOs, because oil prices were high and energy companies had the highest stock-market valuations.
Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.
This might be true but I don't see why it is obvious, especially when it's not even commonly assumed that the best person to run a software company is a software engineer.
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 it comes to oil, new value in the form of oil fields is also discovered. Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value, iterating in software is also prospecting for value. It's just that unlike oil, you can use software to prospect for all kinds of value very quickly.
If you gave a list of non-software companies that had software engineers as their CEOs, i'd give this some credence, but as is this is kind of rediculous when you have a giant elephant in the room confounding factor that you're pretending doesn't exist.
> Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value
So is literally everything.
Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest
Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease.
Okay, but this is a function of the medium not of the people. Crafting successful feedback loops has defined great leaders across industries for hundred(s) of years. A bent toward experimentation is not something that software engineers possess. It's a trait that great leaders build into their businesses.
In my circles, I see little to no experimentation done in the computer field, much to my dismay. We already have the best simulator for the universe, itself.
Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)
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
I mean i think its clear what you're saying, the evidence you provide just doesn't support your conclusion all that well compared to the other possibilities.
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.
...because these companies are engineering companies?
7/10 of the biggest companies are software companies. 6/7 of the software companies were founded by engineers. Ma is an outlier.
Any of these other points might be true, but there's no empirical reason to expect that that they predict "success." The simpler explanation is that software company founders tend to be engineers. Financial companies tend to be run by financiers, etc.
Conclusions like "discovery of solutions via techniques like continuous A/B testing" may be true, but they're not required to explain why engineer founded companies dominate the top 10.
The article itself explains it: software is swallowing the world. 7 of the top 10 companies by market cap are software companies (or closely related).
Do bankers tend to lead banking companies? A cursory glance at the top-5 banks in the US indicates that to be the case. They were largely founded by, and are currently run by, bankers.
"Kid, never write software for a hardware company."
The reason I was given for this advice is that they don't understand how iterations work in software, and so they can grossly misunderstand your level of doneness. This is first a big headache and then a source of post-release problems because you end up rushing things out.
Getting more software-savvy people into management in more industries would definitely help with that.
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 "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me).
That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!!
Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing.
[0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment.
Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this.
> *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs
Yes, I did, which is why I find it so disingenuous. I mean, looking at their chart, 7/10 do not have software engineer CEOs. And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple.
"Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup).
--
Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com type of stuff.
> Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value).
Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.)
They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.
Co-founder has nothing to do with CEO. Clearly Wozniak was the technical co-founder, not the business co-founder. I have never seen any hint of him being anything but terrible at business.
In a small company, every person has enough influence to rival the CEO and every role overlaps enough that the distinction given by titles is meaningless inside the company. Mainly the distinction given by titles determines how people market themselves outside the company where the dividing roles will appear clear for marketing purposes, which they are not in reality.
"Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer."
My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).
My view as a developer with an MBA is that I got it because the hardest problems I was facing were people/political/business problems rather than tech problems.
I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.
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 not the title.
> Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer
He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
Jobs is said to have influenced the choice and use of Objective C at NS significantly - even if he didn’t code, he had enough understanding to guide it. Also his first job at Atari was as a developer, though it’s said that he got Wozniak to do most of it!
>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.
Eric Schmidt wrote lex. He was an engineering executive at Sun. His background is absolutely as a software engineer.
People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".
Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.
So you can only be a software engineer if you studied computer science? Not any other highly technical degree that's regularly hired into software engineering positions?
Furthermore, IMO there are a ton of questionable assumptions littered throughout the article.
The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.
Agreed. A plausible explanation for why the largest companies are tech companies is low marginal cost of replication combined with widespread appeal combined with network effects and IP moat which confers monopoly margins.
Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins.
The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.
Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure.
Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling.
And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.
Yeah, this seems more like "why are software companies more successful". Looking at only the top 10 companies then speculating seems like a waste of time, why not just omit the data entirely at this point?
Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well.
Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer.
Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.
Then they should revise the title to "Software engineers make the best founders."
To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;).
I mean, read this:
> After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders.
What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices"
This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.
"Economic value is also theorized to be the universal organizing force of secular society, and the nature of value is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the three dominant value management systems, each having proceeded out of its own particular value state. Individual contributors are often attracted to a particular type of value, and they are therefore intrinsically motivated by the unique properties of that value type. Often, humans perceive their own value to society in terms of their ability to produce or replicate a thing of value such as a meal, or concert, or a manufactured good. Others might perceive their value in terms of their net worth, and creative individuals might perceive their value in terms of their ability to discover new solutions or their ability to create new works of value."
To your note on Bezos, this section of the article is what really juxtaposed nicely for me with your comment on Bezos not coding:
>So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes.
I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.
If Apple ends up tumbling down in the next, say, 5 years, with Cook still at the helm, what would that say about Cook as the CEO? To me, Apple seems to be in the Microsoft's home-run stretch where they dominated the market with 99% desktop penetration for a while, but no clear "where next".
Apple certainly won't fall because of their sheer size and momentum (just like Microsoft never did), but we look at things differently at that scale and for a while, Microsoft was "stagnant" and "backtracking".
I don't know how people define "most successful CEOs of all time", but I do know that predicting future is a fool's errand (you can go into statistics and risk evaluation, but here we are talking about one person thus not much room for "statistics": I mean, everyone who's hugely successful but then hugely fails has been mostly hugely successful right until they failed).
If they stumble in five years, which seems incredibly unlikely given that there’s a billion people that love their iphones more than almost anything, he would still probably be the most successful CEO in history if you consider shareholder value created.
I think it took a while for the Ballmer effect to kick in at Microsoft. Organizations have creating new things baked into their DNA, and it does resist corrosion. So I am curious to see if Cook can avoid squelching that like Ballmer.
Operations is great to have and Cook is really good at it. Focus on ops can destroy the creative process though.
I figure another 8 years and we'll know for sure (Ballmer clocked in at 14). I look forward to being wrong, Cook is a great human being.
Also Microsoft lost all relevance in being a mobile phone platform under Ballmer. I can't think of a similar blunder from Cook, maybe losing mindshare from creative professionals, but that's a much smaller market that Apple could be making a comeback in.
Cook is 10 years into his tenure at Apple. Since Ballmer took over in 2000, we can look at the period between 2001 and 2011 for comparison.
During that time, their stock price fell at least 10%. The launch of Windows Vista was bungled (XP outlived Vista). They had a string of failures in the phone market, before finally abandoning it. They had a string of failed acquisitions, including Nokia. Remember the Microsoft Stores?
Azure was the only real lasting success acheived under Ballmer.
Apple is as much a software ompany as it is a hardware company. MS is much more a software company. Cook is a supply chain guy, and with the majority of Apple manufactirung happening at third parties, the operationa excellence is what makes Cook a great CEO, more so because he seems to understand all the other sides of the business as well.
I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro (my first Apple laptop) because I didn’t have anymore reasons to stay with PC. For a long time I was looking at Macbooks like shiny overpriced gadgets, but with its 20 hour lifetime, great screen and performance, amazing touchpad, while Windows 10 being buggier than Windows 7, I stopped having reasons not to switch.
I always found the "overpriced" theme on Apple hardware curious: it always sounds like people are comparing with "wrong" PC hardware.
Whenever I was buying a new laptop, I've only considered MacBooks because they did one thing I cared about a lot (high resolution displays in portable machines), and they were usually cheaper[1] compared to laptops I went for (lately X1 Carbons: worse performance [lower TDP CPUs], better battery life, worse but acceptable screen, keyboards way ahead — in essense, better keyboards and Linux compatibility + nicer design [personal take :] for worse performance and pricing on par or worse than MacBooks). M1 Macs now win even on battery life too, so it's going to be even harder to stay away from them going forward.
Still, keyboards and Linux compatibility will likely keep me in the HP/Thinkpad business lines for longer, but pricing is not the factor when it comes to choosing Apple computers or not for some jobs.
[1] Configuring a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen brings the Linux + i7-10610U 1.8GHz/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/2560x1440 screen up to $2022 today (down from "retail" price of $3140, which I hope nobody is paying anywhere, ever), and for roughly that money you get a 13" Macbook Pro with i5 ("up to 3.8GHz"), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 2560x1600 13" screen.
Maybe you are right, and Linux desktop improved probably a lot in the last 10 years, I was just very frustrated because I bought a high-end gaming laptop last year with Windows 10, and the system slowed down all the time (for example I had to wait seconds for the start menu after pressing the Windows button).
With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.
Coding really does teach something that I've never learned anyplace else. I've also done just about zero in the arts, so maybe there are some parallels there, I should try music or painting someday to see. I know for sure that math and engineering classes didn't teach me what coding taught me.
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.
I did not mention that mathematics did not teach me that, but programming pushed that to a limit that maths didn't - probably because I do not spend 8h a day, every working day doing maths :)
No engineering discipline allows for “ambiguity” at least how you use it here, try building a train or a spacecraft with that level of ambiguity at that point the bugs tend to make things go boom.
I'd argue that it forces you to think clearly about problems. You cannot write a program unless you understand exactly what you want it to do. In contrast typical CEO excels at creating tons of meaningless fluff. Perhaps mathematics or philosophy may have similar effects on people's ways of thinking?
This is not a reply to you personally well not just but to everyone else...
A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
Like personally I would wager that most programmers do not understand exactly what they are building when they start, I know I don’t always and I never really met anyone who does so either at least not constantly. You know the general direction then you tend to hack things until they work and optimize and fix edge cases as needed.
We very much can write programs without understanding what we need to do or even how things work otherwise we wouldn’t have bugs that are not hardware errata and even then one can argue that if you truly know what you are doing you plan for hardware failure.
> A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
What makes you think I underestimate those other disciplines? I do not. The other disciplines tend to focus on tangible rather than on abstraction. Programming (if you want to actually be good at it) requires you to tackle abstractions all day long. My theory is that that ability translates (in some people!) to being better CEO.
> B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
You are mixing stuff here. I can guarantee you that if you know what you want to build and have the clarity to make the right choices, the hacky project will turn out better than if you don't. Specific development practices (e.g. hacks vs. no hacks) has no relation to personal ability to formulate clear problem statement.
Nothing here is exclusive to programming, in fact this isn’t exclusive to engineering even.
Formulating a clear problem statement is applicable to essentially every field and I would argue is probably the hardest thing to master and what most people fail at.
At least personally the most improvement I have experienced in formulating a problem statement had nothing to do with actual technical work but rather when I worked in professional services and had to come up with new service offerings, writing up proposals and managing stakeholders.
Formulating a problem is definitely a soft skill that I would say most purely technical programs don’t teach that well, quite often because you are given the problem statement to solve. This is also true for technical work and why some people might find it hard to progress in their careers. I’ve met plenty of brilliant and highly experienced engineers that suffer from major tunnel vision and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
To iterate different embodiments of ideas with people until something gets traction. I do think that is actually something the arts teachers, but I've done none of the arts so no personal experience to compare.
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 at best).
So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.
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 or, like, history?
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
Say I majored in physics and went on to get a masters in fine arts and became a world-renowned screenwriter, would you call me a mathematician? That’s argument is equivalent with claims that Cook is a software engineer.
Hi, I'm the original author. The point of the article is as follows: there is clearly a trend towards top market-cap companies being founded by software engineering CEOs, but why? The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. I believe there are two reasons:
1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on.
2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages.
Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well).
As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.
8/10 companies on your list are software companies, of those 7/8 have software engineer CEO's. The only thing you've shown is that successful software companies are often led by software engineers. I bet you'll find similar patterns in other industries. Who better to have visionary leadership than an engineer who grasps the industry perfectly.
I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.
Interesting that you propose their success is based on the value fulfillment cycle which seems like something I would be far more likely to hear from an mba/pm than a software engineer.
IMO, the answer to why the biggest companies tend to be started by software engineers is far far simpler and something you can find in your ordinary econ 101 textbook. Your standard natural monopoly is one which has high fixed costs and low marginal costs such that the first one to dominate the market can usually sustain that because their ongoing costs are low while any new entrant has to pay down the high fixed costs to enter the market. While usually associated with utilities, software matches that pretty well and software companies tend to be started by software engineers.
Writing software (the fixed cost) is extremely expensive as you need to pay a lot to get good engineers and you need a ton of them to handle the complexity associated with the largest markets but once you have written the software, it is relatively cheap to run (the marginal cost). Once one company starts dominating a software market, they can amortize the fixed costs across the greatest number of users and continuously invest to make their software continuously better such that it becomes almost impossible for a competitor to catch up.
You can see this today with the cloud as AWS rakes in billions in profits because they have the most features, biggest head start, and most IAAS revenue while the other companies lose billions (5.6 billion for google last year for example) trying to catch up.
Software is eating the world but you are discounting the possibility that this force is simply drawing in the best and brightest; part sorting hat and part black hole pulling in the biggest stars.
Cornelius Vanderbilt [1] mastered steam powered shipping before tackling rail. An operator of technical machinery more than a trained engineer but relatively very technical for the 2nd Industrial Age IMO.
I agree with you except about Bezos, the point is not if you work as a developer while you're the CEO, if that was the metric no CEO of a large company would "be" anything.
Definitely. I'd be interested to see how this breaks down for the S&P 500, with more rigor around what constitutes an engineer - maybe have different categories?
There is a common trope around engineers being better managers and CEo in germany as we.. Not software, but engineers in general. Everyody always points at the successfull ones, only to forget that some of the biggest business fuck ups, e.g. VW, happened under engineering CEOs (without MBAs).
I think, that is the power of word "many". If the claim was "1% of all CEOs are sw engineers", it wouldn't be that impressive, even though 1% may be actually quite lot of people (many). :)
If you actually want to show that software engineers wind up being more successful CEO's then you can't look at the top 10 companies, there is virtually zero statistical significance here whatsoever.
Instead, take a look at the Fortune 500 at a minimum (or better yet, all publicly traded companies). And then you need to rigorously define what makes a CEO "better" -- which isn't market cap. Indeed, it could trivially be the case that software engineers fail 10x as often as other founders, but that they found 100x more companies so they have more absolute successes.
The only thing that the top-10 shows is that there are a lot of tech companies in the top 10, and that tech companies tend to be founded by software engineers, while non-tech companies aren't. Which is... about as surprising as saying that mega-financial companies tend to be founded by bankers, or that restaurants tend to be founded by chefs.
Thank you for using a causal diagram. A tool so few understand but so many can benefit from. Cuts to the heart of the argument and eliminates all the bullshit.
Hi, I'm the original author. It's late for me, but if you have questions or comment for me, I will get back to you in the morning.
The article has to do with this idea: "Software engineers deeply understand that you iterate your way to value through hundreds of failed attempts.”
I by no means think software engineers are smarter or more virtuous. What I do think is that the high rates of fail from writing code teaches them to discover value iterative -- hence the Agile movement. Learning is pivoting moment by moment, and planning one value attempt or value experiment at a time IMO. It is the nature of value that shaped this behavior IMO, not some superior virtue -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures?
I also agree with others who said limiting analysis to the top 10 seems arbitrary, especially when you're covering mostly just the runaway outliers despite having the general overall claim of "why are software engineers better CEOs?" Does your analysis still hold when you expand your field of vision to the top 100, or top 1,000 companies?
> Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures?
Because with software the time-to-market is instantaneous.
Intelligent people make the best CEOs. Software engineers are probably more intelligent, on average, than others. I think it might be better to look at IQ+EQ and see if there's a correlation there instead (although that data is probably not feasible to obtain).
Software Engineering is bounded by the laws of magic.
Engineering requires creativity to harness a material to perform useful work, within the material’s tolerances.
Software Engineering requires creativity to create worlds that have no existence in reality, other than in the imagination of the software engineer himself.
And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
No, software engineering is also bound by the laws of physics. The worlds do have existence in reality, which you will find out as soon as anything you create starts hitting the physical limits of CPU, memory, latency, which are all pretty much governed by c, the cosmic speed limit.
> And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
The problem with using market cap for tech is that Wall Street and the financial industry in general factors in too much "hype" and imagined future earnings into their valuations. This should be obvious to anyone that sees headlines of X Company with unreliable revenue model now valued at $50 Billion.
If instead you look at industries which don't have as much of this future hype, they are much more competitive. Fashion, for instance. LVMH has a market cap of $283 billion and Bernard Arnault briefly surpassed Bezos as the richest man in the world in 2019.
I don't doubt that Amazon will overtake Walmart, but I have an issue with calling someone the best CEO today based on a metric that is dependent on future projections.
I don't think you have understood my initial point. Please, read my first comment again.
I'm not saying that Amazon won't overtake Walmart, but that tech companies benefit from future projections factored into their valuations, while other non-hyped businesses don't. If the argument is that "software engineers make the best CEOs", it seems more likely that companies in the software industry simply get higher valuations for the aforementioned reasons.
Still not particularly useful if we are comparing new companies to old ones. I'm sure the brand new oil companies of 1875 had incredible revenue growth in the ±20 years after their founding, too. Does that mean that oil men make the best CEOs?
I mean, those oil men clearly had something going on that was relevant to what was tractionable at the time, and revenue growth can be an indicator of finding that traction in the market. As mentioned below, it can also be a sign of graft.
Of course through the lens of history, considering climate change, the best CEO was the one who didn't unleash a huge pile of CO2!
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
Yeah, also drawing conclusions from just the top ten companies is silly. But how do software engineers do managing non-software companies? Elon Musk is doing well. I guess you could count Amazon as retail instead of software. What other examples are there?
The answer seems too obvious to state. Companies with SW at the core need someone who knows what’s feasible. Same reason why Berkshire Hathaway (on their list) has a Financier at the core - they’re in the Capital allocation business. It’s why most law firms are run by a lawyer. And why most research universities presidents have a PhD.
There is a bias in this article and that is the context of time. Over time there will be less and less software engineers at the top of this list as software engineering becomes more common field of study. If you look at the people listed, they were people who set up these companies not to make money. I am not saying they are not interested in money, but if you were someone interested in mainly in making money within a reasonable time frame and you were intelligent at the times Google, FB and others were invented, building these companies would have not been the easiest way to make money at those times (dot com bubble etc). These people started these companies due to an obsession with the problem, the need to make a change etc.
These companies have grown to be insane empires, not because it has been software engineers running them, but software engineering is a new field that greatly impacts the world at this time and they are the people that solved the harder mainstream problems at the time. If this was in the industrial age, we would see more blacksmiths and manufacturers and railroad builders on the list, than farmers or accountants or whatever. It is a mixture of time, depth of problem and an obsession to solve it. Not that there is something intrinsically special about software engineers
I know I'm being repetitive of points already made by prior posters, but the logical fallacy of this article is so egregious that I can't help but post it again.
The opening paragraph of this article:
"From the onset, we have chosen to use one of Wall Street's measures of a better CEO – namely, market cap. In other words, by this measure, CEOs that create the most value are the best CEOs. Sure, there are other measures perhaps more virtuous; but market capital is well-known, generally reliable, and historically trended. So, let’s just roll with it as our measure of “better CEOs” as we have lots to discuss.
An objective review of the data leads to the conclusion: top companies are increasingly founded and managed by software engineers."
The first 100 words in this paragraph and the "objective conclusion" drawn is all you need to read to know the remaining 7000+ words are completely logically flawed. It's like making the assertion "the best restaurants in the world serve the most meals, so an objective review of the data leads to the conclusion that fast food restaurants have the best chefs."
One of the brilliant things about start-ups is that it allows you to step directly into the CEO shoes, and I'm amazed by and extremely grateful for the willingness of investors to allow first time founders to learn on the fly.
There is a hurdle though, that being a CEO of a startup is a full time job. A consequence is that if you happen to be a strong engineer with relevant skills in a cash strapped environment, you will come under strong pressure to be an engineer and perform poorly as a CEO unless you can raise the funds to hire a top-tier engineer.
Now I get to insert yet another gripe against Europe and its horrible environment for fundraising. I believe that the lack of technical CEOs is likely due to the lack of resources (both at startups and large companies) to develop them.
I'm not sure why it's so surprising that tech companies are more successful when the CEO is tech aware. Understanding the challenges of software engineering and development and knowing the range of feasibilities for what software can and cannot solve with an intuition into the effort and cost of each is for sure an advantage as a CEO when running a software driven company.
I'd say if you don't have that perspective and are CEO of a software driven company, I'd make sure that you have a very close group of constant SE advisers to help you out.
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 anything I would assume developers are substantially worse than average as CEOs, from lacking interpersonal skills to exaggerated focus on details.
I'm not sure I follow the methodology here. Apple isn't worth 2 trillion because of Wozniak, who hasn't been at the company in decades. It's worth that much because it's a technology company, and technology is profitable, and almost tautologically founders of technology companies are technologists.
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.
According to the last company I worked at, software engineers can do everyone else's jobs when things get behind. PO busy? Work with the customer to get requirements, then write stories and tickets. QA running behind? Developers can do the testing. Need to hire more people and the manager doesn't have time? Have the devs do all the interviews. Need more ops staff? Call it DevOps and put the devs on call.
So clearly software engineers are the smartest people in any organization. No wonder they become CEOs!
There are so many things wrong with just using market cap as a proxy for success. A better measure (if you want to use equity prices) would be change in share price during the tenure of the CEO relative to their industry peer group. I think that's also the basis for most CEO compensations. Market caps change based on discount rates, time in the economic cycle, financial structure of the company (debt vs equity), share buyback programs, equity offerings, etc, etc.
This article needs an image of the plane with red dots where all the bullet holes were. That, or to explain how great software engineer CEOs include Jonathan Schwartz, Stephen Elop, and all those one-person companies that are still waiting for the coffee shops in Palo Alto to reopen so they can pick up their “business address” mail.
They touch on it, but I think one crucial benefit is the ability to see the scope of software work in general, which in turn drives and defines modern business.
Unrealistic scope expectations are a huge problem for business people without the technical background to intuit pitfalls.
Anecdotal. Back in the day, I worked for a large distribution company where the CEO, CCO, CFO, and COO came from IT. When you looked through the code you could still see their commits. They had a unique perspective because they had in their minds giant maps of how everything connected behind scenes. Purchasing, orders, payments, receivables, inventory, etc. For example. The people in purchasing only knew how purchasing worked but they didn't understand how the system connected with finance or operations. But the C* executives knew, and understood what was possible and what difficult. They were very effective. It was a pleasure working with them. To this day I think it was a great model.
Another version of the question -- why are so many successful companies centered on software? Asked that way, CEOs with developer or software engineering experience isn't so surprising, but leads to the more interesting questions around software's prominent role in our current economy.
I suspect that within 25 years that mix will change as being a "software company" will become less of a meaningful distinction (and to some degree already is -- what is a "tech" company these days?). Every company will be a "software company" and won't lean as heavily on its leadership being having a specific background in technology.
ETA - ah, looking at comments I see others have already made the same point.
I think the most striking thing to notice in that list is that the top 7 or so businesses are closely related to software. The article alludes to the fact that software is a big industry. And those businesses all seem to share a similarity, which is that they chose as their CEO the person who happened to have founded the business, or who owns / owned it outright.
These are also people who have figured out how to make software development work for them, not kill them. That's huge.
An interesting study would be to see how people with software engineering background (by some agreed upon definition) fare as CEO's of companies that they didn't start or own. Granted, that might take more time and study.
As someone working in it-consulting for some big companies in germany, i can't confirm. It's usually the other way around - if a company grows too fast, they're tempted to make some smart engineer a manager. usually they will have a hard time coming from a very detailed world into the high level business world. besides being good problem-analysts, they are confronted with politics, strategy, leadership, ... - so all the skills that really matter at ceo level.
That being said, i can't agree with the statement that sw engineers make the best CEOs. But i tend to agree that a basic knowledge of IT/Software/Hardware is a must.
I used to point this out to a founder of a former company. He'd reject out ideas and suggestions, then make jokes like "there's a reason engineers aren't CEOs!" I had to remind him of all the successful companies run by engineers.
The best tech startups I've worked for had technical CEOs or co-founders with engineering backgrounds ("best" meaning good to work for and most successful.) Worst were guys who thought they were going to somehow be the next Bill Gates just because he didn't graduate college, either.
Primarily because the companies listed succeeded in capitalizing on Software Eating the World (Thiel).
Software companies grew the way they did because, for a while, there was little regulatory capture, with tech doing what tech wanted, at least with the unicorns. Thiel, PG have commented on this.
There was a recent article on HN from O'Reilly - the new wave of breakthroughs anticipated, in biotech, might not have room for engineer CEOs, nor the unicorn growth of software-based start-ups.
Just a small nitpick: what you probably mean is there was little regulation. Regulatory capture is what occurs after regulation has been established, is seen as a hindrance and companies start currying favour by greasing the wheels. In a word, captured regulatory agencies are beholden to the industry. See also: Ajit Pai in the FCC, SOPA, Boeing and the FAA...
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?"
Umm, if the product is software the domain expertise helps for that, but im not sure how companies like Shell or United Airlines benifit from a software CEO.
"Systems thinking" is useful to manage any organization. I don't know if it scales, but I can't count the number of times I've seen an engineer put in charge of a project just because they can understand a data flow diagram.
Software is eating the world. IT costs and benefits are high. Getting IT right in many organizations is now more vital than ever before.
The first thing that comes to mind is that correlation is not causation.
The author says nothing to address that. In fact, not far into the article they effectively state they're just going to assume that his hypothesis is correct and then proceeds to hunt for reasons why. This raises all kinds of red flags for me.
I'm sure you don't have to look far for a common cause explanation of the hypothesis.
I wonder how much classic survival bias plays a role in this.
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.
While none of them should conduct software engineering tasks and better leave that work to professionals, it certainly is good to understand how the process works, and how to value the struggles of plugging things together to create something out of nothing.
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.
The same way many engineers are successful CEOs: software engineers are successful in general because it is a profession that CAN make you smarter every day. It is too easy to see the value of compound interest.
The classic selection bias. If the list of "top" companies is mostly software companies (which is FAANG++ at the moment), then how is it uncommon for a software engg. to lead the company ?
My thought as well. The last two CEOs of ExxonMobil were engineers, the last CEO of Boeing was an engineer, and the CEO of General Motors is an engineer. Of course, all in mechanical or electrical engineering rather than software.
Not sure why it's so insightful that people who understand the business also run the business.
From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :)
I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.
> People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products.
I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.
Not all MBAs are pursuing personal money, but when there's high visibility debacle (Intel, Boeing) there are always MBAs and accountant involved, not engineers. It's against engineer's logic to do moves/products like that.
I would imagine that in proportion to the amount of jobs in software engineering, the representation at CEO level is disproportionately small compared to other fields.
Has anybody else noticed that list is dominated by American companies? Should we be asking why are are American software engineer led companies dominating the list?
>In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science.
maybe because its a lot easier to code a side project and build it from there then to have to hire someone just to build your MVP? In addition, you're likely to know other engineers you can recruit.
Many of the 'top companies' at the moment are youngish software companies, many still run by their founders or early employees, which include lots of software engineers.
If the current big thing was biotech the 'best' (ie most) CEOs would be chemists.
TLDR article but seems it, and most of the top level comments here surprisingly miss the obvious answer. Software engineers practice systematic logical thinking on a daily basis. Most other fields do not, and if you’ve worked for people from those fields, you’ve certainly seen the lack of structured thinking. Combine structured logical thinking about systems and processes with a few of the other skills needed to succeed as a founder and you can go very far.
I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not?