> 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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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".
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.
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.
Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And not just software engineers.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”?
Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.