Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

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> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.

Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as fungible.

The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly get away with in the current market. This is the only industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem. Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview + colonoscopy their engineers do.

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers

This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.

I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it. But I think its neither controversial nor false that engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most executives to write even half competent software. Outside of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have reported to generally have been out of engineering for a long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to someone so out of touch with their field.

I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to.

Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.

And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management?

So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success.

Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)

> tech company engineering has to be good

As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".

I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later.

Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years.

Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.

I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows.

For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything.

With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.

> most engineers are terrible at selling

Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And not just software engineers.

> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.

No, you can’t. Source: I’ve tried.

Some? Sure, you can teach some of them. Hell, some become exceptional at it. Most could not care less about it, though, and are thus terrible at answering customer questions, doing sales, understanding how to optimize a funnel, negotiating a sales contract, or anything else.

Even doing demos is a taught effort, whereas some folks naturally give great demos.

It’s okay for there to be room for multiple important skillsets in a company. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Some of it is hubris, some just naivety.

It's very true that in a e.g. a "pure" software tech company, software engineers have much more power than they do in say an oil exploration company. This isn't surprising, it's the basics of being a profit center or a cost center. In this case engineering definitely has a "crash the company" lever; But this doesn't make the company succeed. In order to do that you need to understand the markets, customers, financing, etc. parameters, not just the tech. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, (and when) is usually more important than the tech, honestly. Hell, a huge swath of the "tech" sector isn't about doing much interesting on the tech side. Which isn't to say you can get away with crap work, just that it's mostly straightforward and you have to care.

I've much rather bet on a company with a great CEO and mediocre developers than one with a mediocre CEO and great developers. If you're building the wrong product it doesn't matter if Carmack or Linus is writing the code the company will fail. And judging from the code and technical competence I've seen, it's isn't uncommon for a company to succeed with mediocre devs

> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.

Have you run a large company? I've run a small one so was forced to learn all of these skills, and let me tell you, it was hard, I found it much harder than learning how to code.

Exactly this. I worked at a small startup where we had great engineering talent. It was hard to find in this area. We got a product built, shipped, running with beta B2B customers... then it fell flat on its face.

After the initial release, there was little to no marketing, poor go-to-market strategy, and slow sales. This was all the CEO's realm. Sales and marketing is hard.

> If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.

I’m not sure Twitter is a good case study of CEOs being interchangable.

> If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground

Why was that again? That 80% of the engineering team, uhm, “walked”?

Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers.

Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.

The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code.

So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?

> Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company.

My comment was specifically talking about startups. Not about stable companies. Please see context of the preceeding comment, too.

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